Issue 15 - Pdf Ctrl+P - CTRL+P: a journal of contemporary art

Ctrl+Pdf 

Journal of Contemporary Art 

A journal of contemporary art published digitally for easy reproduction 

and circulation by anyone and everyone around the world 

www.ctrlp-artjournal.org 

Sade for Sade’s Sake (2008-9) by Paul Chan at the Arsenale 53rd Venice Biennale. Photo credits: Eliza Tan 

Uploaded Issue No. 15 

October 2009 

Essays 94 to 106 

ISSN 1908-9805 

Editorials 

Dealing with the Art Market/P1 

Flaudette May V. Datuin 

Art and the Market: Pining for a Breather?/P3 

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez 

The Philippine Modern: 

Conceiving a Collective Category/P33 

Parick D. Flores 

Prized Possessions: 

The Promise of the Contemporary 

in Philippine Art Competitions/P46 

Jay Giovanni Bautista 

Review 

The Brave New Works of 13A/P49 

Renée Alphonso 

About Ctrl+P’s Contributors 

and Editorial Board/P51 

Issue Editors 


Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez 

Editorial Board 


Varsha Nair 

Judy Freya Sibayan 

What Does “Recovery” Look Like in the Art World? 

Or Surviving the Next Art Market Bubble/P6 

Irene S. Leung 

Re-framing the Biennale: 2010/P11 

Gina Fairley 

The 53rd Venice Biennale 

Fare Mondi, Making Worlds/P15 

Eliza Tan 

Object Lessons/P20 

Patrick D. Flores 

Signs of Wonder/P22 

Joselina Cruz 

Lisa Yuskavage/P23 

Gerry Coulter 

Flashing Emin: Critical Analysis of 

“Spectacular” Contemporary Arts/P28 

Kubilay Akman 

The Artist’s Reserved Rights 

Transfer and Sale Agreement/P32 

Seth Siegelaub 

Ctrl+P September 2009

FlauDette may v. datuin 

Editorials 

Dealing with the Art Market 

In 29 April 1989 one of the eight white porcelain urinals based on Duchamp’s 1917 ‘readymade’ 

and issued in 1964 by the Galleria Schwarz in Milan was bought for US$68,750 

at Sotheby, New York against an estimate of $2,000-2,500. According to Eileen Channin 

in her book Collecting Art (Craftsman House, 1990), it was one of the high points of 

the Andy Warhol sale. Ironically for Duchamp, his urinal—through which he aimed to 

demonstrate that art objects had no intrinsic artistic value in terms of labor and material 

costs—became the art object he never intended it to be. 

“The buyer’s need for the object and exchange of this sum for it determined the 

value of that need and the value of the urinal, the art object,” writes Channin. “The value 

in the market then is the value of the need any single person has for an object. Price is 

dictated by supply and demand.” This observation is concretized in local terms by an 

anecdote that Tina Fernandez, one of the speakers in the Ctrl+P forum on the art market 

held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines a few months back, relates: 

A collector walks into the gallery and asks: “do you have a Borlongan, 

Santos or Justiniani?” I asked: “are you familiar with their works?” 

And they said “no but a lot of my friends told us to buy and we are just 

starting to collect.” Why don’t you do this, I suggest, why don’t you 

browse through the gallery and tell me what works attract you or which 

works you find beautiful. At that time, there was an exhibition, but the 

labels were deliberately omitted. After following the suggestion, they 

totally ignored the Borlongan, Santos and Justiniani, and chose instead 

two paintings from an artist they never heard of before. 

“A lot of collectors don’t know why they buy, what the artwork is all about, they 

do not know what is beautiful to them,” Fernandez elaborates. Or as Channin observes, 

critical valuation has little to do with art market values or the price a buyer is prepared to 

pay according to how badly he/she needs and desires to acquire an object, egged on, as 

the Fernandez anecdote shows, by scant information from friends and peers. And since art 

market valuations behave in “a less theoretical manner,” as Channin puts it, it is a pervasive 

perception that the art market of dealers, auction houses and collectors has “hijacked” 

the arts’ reward and value system. As curators, critics and scholars (including this writer) 

opined during the Ctrl+P forum, the art market revs up, overheats, sputters if not come 

to a complete stop, then revs up again exuberantly and at times, irrationally—without the 

proper curatorial and critical framework on how to view art beyond its commercial value. 

There is need to “create” informed collectors through education, Fernandez insists, and 

this is why she established Art Informel, a semi-commercial-cum-workshop-cum gallery 

space she formed out of a family residence with a group of artists. 

For Irene Leung, what has been missing is a “robust debate about monetization 

—where does art practice intersect with money?”—a question that, as Kubilay Akman 

suggests in his critique of the media-and-market savvy Tracey Emin, must take “account 

of the social, cultural and artistic structures that produce, reproduce and make it as art in 

a dynamic process.” Gerry Coulter does a similar maneuver by recuperating the controversial 

nudes of American painter Lisa Yuskavage. Lashing out at macho critics, Coulter 

reminds us of an important theoretical point contributed by feminism: seeing, looking 

and reacting to works, especially those that are couched in a visual idiom traditionally 

associated with male expression and creativity, is value-laden, and in this case, highly 

gendered. 

The tension between theoretically clueless criticism and un-theoretical commercial 

viability, on one hand and theoretically-informed critical valuation and legitimation, on 

the other, understandably creates anxieties to art historians, critics, artists and curators 


who believe their professional endeavors should transcend market concerns, appealing 

instead, to aesthetic, philosophic, or even ethical and moral concerns. No less than Eileen 

Legaspi-Ramirez, guest- and co-editor for this issue expressed such anxiety, by prefacing 

her editorial with a disclosure about her soiled image of the art market and a recounting 

of her painful encounter, in 1994, with “vultures” who were circling her grandfather’s, 

National Artist Cesar Legaspi’s, deathbed knowing that their investment will multiply 

at his passing. 

Marina Cruz, a young rising star whose success in art fairs and auctions Legaspi- 

Ramirez describes as “dramatic” expressed at one point during her talk in the forum: 

“Are we less ‘good’ because we are commercially successful?” All she desires (perhaps 

naively, as another panelist points), she says, is for her work to be appreciated by the different 

publics—from the most knowledgeable of insiders to the least initiated art world 

‘outsiders,’ the people who, driven by curiosity, take the time to stop and look at the works 

she was documenting outside her house. The fact that collectors buy her works is a stroke 

of luck she is humbly grateful for, but like other artists present in the forum, she values 

critical validation and recognition equally, if not more, than her commercial success. 

Joselina Cruz in her talk, on the other hand, took the Ctrl+P forum brief to task 

for what she perceived as unproblematized observation that boundaries are blurring between 

biennales/triennales, on one hand and art fairs, on the other. The first Philippine 

curator to join an international curatorial team in the biennale mode, Cruz insisted that 

while both have validation powers, the latter are more open-ended, more price-driven. 

Biennales, on the other hand, are more rigorously framed by a theoretical and critical 

mentality, even if such criticality is often compromised and limited—as she relates in 

her essay on her experiences curating the most recent Singapore Biennale—by logistic 

and contextual givens. Caught between what Gina Fairley describes as “a schizophrenic 

ricochet between the institutional white cube and the raw (un)familiar site, which has 

increasingly become a marketing chip to identifying and growing these events to local 

and international audiences” and layered “with a trend to package these exhibitions with 

other events,” the biennale’s critical and self-reflexive edge, start to blur—exactly the 

point of the Ctrl+P forum brief and call for papers. 

For Eliza Tan, the Venice Biennale similarly offers nothing perspectivally fresh, 

although she took diligent note of the good pace, narrative roundness and accessibility, 

and the hushed, un-ostentatious character of works in the curated segments. And in a 

more optimistic vein, Patrick Flores hailed the Gwanju Biennale as having a more robust 

theoretical frame and discussion, which was absent, he writes, in other eight biennales 

that opened in the same season of the year in Asia. Contributing to a section of Gwanju 

Biennale called Position Papers, he centered on four germinal figures on Southeast Asia, 

one of whom, Raymundo Albano, pioneered the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) 

collection. The contributions of Albano along with other lively minds of the early 70s to 

the 80s, most of whom are still active today (Sibayan, Pastor Roces, Chabet, to name a 

few) are reckoned with in Flores’ other essay in this issue—a reprint from the catalogue 

on the survey exhibition on the CCP collection, “Suddenly Turning Visible.” 

Jay Bautista’s essay on Philippine competitions rounds out—though in a less scholarly 

and critical vein—the material on the Philippine art world. It contains historical 

information that may prove useful to the uninitiated as well as anyone who is unfamiliar 

with Philippine art history. Along with the brief review of the Thirteen Artists Awards by 

Rina Alphonso, which the CCP bestows on young artists nominated and deemed promising 

by a panel of jurors, Bautista’s essay tells us that, critical as we may be of competitions 

and awards, they remain influential shapers of careers, artistic directions and values, 

even as they are beset, as Legaspi-Ramirez recounts in her experience as juror, with the 

infrastructural and logistic constraints that similarly limit resource-rich blue-chip events 

like the biennales and triennales. 

As I write this, the CCP is holding a necrological service for the National Artist 

Awards, believed to have “died” because tainted by the unprincipled intervention of the 

state led by an unethical leader and her cohorts. Questions of creative autonomy, respect 

for peer-initiated process, and delicadeza vis-à-vis presidential prerogative empowered 


y law are among the list of tangled issues that are played out in the expressions of 

righteous indignation from Philippine art world luminaries, including former recipients 

of the Awards originated by the much-maligned one-time patroness of the arts, Imelda 

Marcos. Just as we—cultural workers, writers, scholars, artists—are concerned with the 

high-jacking of valuation and rewards by the art market, we are equally indignant at the 

high-jacking of our creative entitlements and prerogatives by an unprincipled state. This 

just goes to show that, no matter how we may try to confine our scholarly and creative 

work to intangibles—aesthetics, art history, criticism, theory, art production, artistic competence 

and vision—we cannot avoid “contamination” by forces from finance, politics 

and economics. At the same time, these intangible pursuits cannot be merely reduced to 

commercial terms, for they have a function as mechanisms quite independent, and even 

critical of any commercial and political efficacy. 

Art history and its allied disciplines thus function contradictorily by simultaneously 

establishing commercial worth and asserting autonomy and freedom from market forces, 

as the art historian Katherine Mansfield (Art History and Its Institutions, Routledge, 2002) 

observes. On one hand, art history supports the commercial status of art by certifying 

attribution, age, style, medium of work and displaying, authenticating and establishing 

expert opinion on art works; on the other hand, art history has developed and systematized 

methods and categories related to “form,” “style,” “originality,” “freshness,” and 

“innovation,” thus facilitating aesthetic appreciation that defy commercial quantification. 

The very demand for originality and novelty for instance, creates an aura of divinity and 

glamour around a small group of favored artists, which gets intensified when repackaged 

and disseminated through media sound bytes, public relations spins, catalogues, auctions, 

art fairs, biennales, thus further increasing the collectors’ desire and need to possess them, 

even despite or maybe because of efforts to sabotage the mechanisms of the market, as 

the Duchamp example shows. 

One key to “dealing with” the art market and making sense of this tangled web of 

contradictions foregrounded by this modest collection of essays, is supplying or making 

available good, substantive and substantial information on works and artists—the kind of 

information that can accessed through Art Informel’s initiatives aimed at creating a group 

of more engaged collectors, and the kind of knowledge that can be gleaned in Flores’ 

attempt to write an initial survey of local state-initiated art collecting framed by a vernacular 

modernism, in Coulter’s and Akman’s assertion of theoretical points on reception 

and art production via critiques of critics (Coulter on Yuskavage), and a current market 

darling (Akman on Emin), and even in Seth Seigelaub’s rather tongue-in-cheek mobilization 

of the language and framework of international law in his draft of an agreement 

form outlining the rights and responsibilities of artists and dealers. And bearing in mind 

that art making, art history, theory, curation, and art production are inescapably linked 

to objects with market value, what we should aim for is a principled negotiated practice, 

one that can only be sustained and achieved, to borrow from Cruz and Leung, with an 

undiminished sense of wonder, a capacity to imagine better futures, and a self-reflexivity 

eileen legaspi-ramirez 

Art and the Market: Pining for a Breather? 

I must confess that it was with much trepidation that I agreed to co-edit this issue on art 

and the market. In the interest of full disclosure, let me just say that I didn’t always have 

such a soiled image of those who made up the financial backbone of the artworld. Having 

grown up in a household that had a hand in furthering a would-be National Artist’s early 

struggling years (when going full-time was not at all an imaginable option) provided a 

generous dose of pragmatism about how art and commerce inevitably encounter each 

other. But even then, it was already off-putting to see how my grandmother and mother 

(the defacto art dealers in the clan) found themselves having to maneuver around those 

who postured as art lovers only to shamelessly bargain down the seasonal living of 

those who craft the art that would ultimately find a space in some stately home, office, 


or gallery. It did not help that when my grandfather was dying of prostrate cancer in 

1994, I’d tenuously explored the possibility of following in my mother’s footsteps, only 

to find out that the vultures (who were unabashedly banking on how their ‘investment’ 

in Cesar Legaspi would double in value upon the public announcement of his passing) 

were circling around the family holdings so menacingly there was hardly room to move. 

So, pardon me please if I’m not so readily able to share the optimism of New York Times 

critic Holland Cotter, here cited by Irene Leung about the artworld getting back to the 

making rather than the hyping of art (aka the bogus claim to being able to reduce the 

validation of art to auction figures, collector profile, museum outings, and such). 

The artworld does in fact operate amidst the contestation and collusion of agents 

within it. And by agents, I do invoke here the entire spectrum—from those who make 

work to those who encounter it in some degree of public engagement or other—even 

within a private space where the art is no longer up for grabs but merely there for contemplation 

or as intended object of covetousness masquerading as public educational tool. 

Art really makes for the strangest bedfellows—note how edge and safe haven occupied 

the same physical space in the Singapore Art Biennale (SAB) as mentioned in Gina 

Fairley’s account Re-framing the Biennale 2010. SAB’s physically situating its parallel 

art fair literally in the bowels of one of its main sites is, to some degree, replicated in the 

recent Philippine art fair which literally positioned non-selling agents of the artworld at 

the fringes of the Bonifacio Global City’s The Tent. 

One is tempted to ask, is this what it has come down to then? The once heady 

power-wielding and presumably less market-implicated institutions like museums and 

cultural centers merely orbiting around the moneyed as mere satellites in the cosmos? 

Specifically in the case of the Philippine artworld where the intersections between 

collectors-dealers-curators constantly get crossed, with catalogues primarily getting selfpublished, 

exhibitions self-curated and promoted, and too many artists producing work 

primarily for auctions, the indications are troubling at the very least. In a world where 

everyone gets to have a say, which voices will ultimately drown out the rest? How do 

such savvy ways to circumvent the webbed systems of art valuation bode for the making 

and meaning-making around art? In one sense of course, the dispersal of power is 

welcome given the decentralization but then that also too easily tips over to populist 

excess. How will this juggling of roles and fence-demolition play out in an environment 

where the field remains dramatically uneven between those who look at art as the 

last bastion of imagination and unfettered thought vis-a-vis those who perceive it as just 

another economic cog to be left to the workings of an already discredited invisible hand 

that reduces it to pesos and centavos? 

Kubilay Akman, in Flashing Emin,Critical Analysis of “Spectacular” Contemporary 

Arts, posits that the artists implicated in exercises in specularization subject themselves 

to “harming the innocence” of the production process, wherein they lose the possibility 

of making art that is more than passing fancy in this highly mediatized world. His text 

begs the question: is the gallery floor always a scene of a crime then given this daily 

ritual of instrumentalization? Does art in fact die when it becomes consumable monetarily 

or becomes of use to those in power? Ergo, can such art be rescued from this 

plight by being physically effaced or literally destroyed? To my mind, such questions 

are particularly pertinent to us in the Philippines, in that locally, even the ‘bad boys’ are 

constantly under threat of being defanged by rabid hoarders only too eager to render the 

discordant mute. 

The next question perhaps would be, if all ‘critical’ art is removed from the center, 

doesn’t the gap get merely filled with the palatable and toothless? Enough recent undertakings 

both in institutional and alternative spaces hereabouts demonstrate this bind—occupy 

or abandon? Undermine or forfeit? To this now admittedly cynical mind, the luxury of 

keeping to an either-or posture is precisely untenable because the stakes are too high. 

In the end, perhaps art’s saving grace rests in its being a largely speculative endeavor. 

Precisely because the compass is constantly being reinvented and tweaked, the 

mechanisms are just almost always difficult to get a handle on. Thrust into the difficult 

position of evaluating some 50 portfolios for the recent Thirteen Artists Award, we three 


judges found ourselves ultimately constrained by such non-art considerations as the 

sluggishness of the institutional structure, the unwillingness of members of the artworld 

to articulate or merely sit back and grunt at the results of such exercises, even the banal 

consideration of how portfolios were put together to begin with. The fact really is, there 

are no hard and fast rules and this is in no small due to the fact that the more presumably 

invested quarters in the artworld are either too lazy, too hermetic, or too defeated to 

wager—how many artists, collectors, gallerists, even curators actually take the time off 

from their nuanced interests to keep up with what’s being written and said about art, or 

visit each other’s studios/spaces, or ask tough questions about their own practices? 

It shouldn’t be too surprising then that the idea prevailing in the public imagination 

is an artworld still merely constituted by quarters that vote with their billfolds. And 

yet, Gerry Coulter reminds us in this issue of Ctrl+P (with his text on the nudes of Lisa 

Yuskavage) that we do in fact, weigh in with such non-monetary acts as reading, how 

the “failure of beauty” cues us into the gaps and fissures that make for art that does not 

run away from the possibility of difficulty. 

Questions of Impetus 

Let us say outright that there will always be poseurs and hucksters on all fronts—artists 

who pad CVs, collectors who negotiate down prices on the premise of keeping works 

for themselves, dealers and PR hacks who play up credentials that ultimately do not count 

in the long term. But precisely because there is still enough currency behind the idea that 

art is the ultimate realm of creation, a domain from which emancipatory ideas emerge 

unhindered to some degree or other by norm and acceptability, the still implicit notion 

is that art needs to be held to a higher standard irreducible to merely self-gratification, 

eking out a livelihood, and accessorizing condominiums. 

Note the treacherous terrain for instance that gets treaded upon with the fairly recent 

attempt (in the Philippines anyway) to invoke the paradigm of cultural industry to peg 

the production of art to quantifiable percentages of GDP. Unfortunately, in an environment 

where hammer prices and spin are taken as gospel truth, the only cold fact is that 

the only real dupes are those that refuse to do their homework and merrily ride the wave 

borne on mostly flawed information and self-aggrandizing though professionally crafted 

must-see events which still a bevy of exhibitions and literature ultimate are. 

Further, when artists refuse to speak, they effectively hand over the reins to those 

who may or may not have any investment in honoring the creative impulse much less 

keep to some palpable barometer of integrity. Thus we find ourselves in the anomalous 

situation where collectors, donor institutions are allowed to invoke market value to keep 

from paying taxes but artists are reduced to pinning value based on materials used; inevitably, 

we will continue to ask—how does one know what art is worth? Hopefully we get 

to the realization sooner than later about how truly slippery such an endeavor is—what is 

one to latch unto really of relevant google links? Twitter citations? ‘Bejewelled’ bodies 

at glitzy openings and art fairs? Number of warm-bodied globe-trotting curators singing 

paeans and gone artist-wooing? 

“Is audience a dirty word?”, critic Gina Fairley gets asked in a recent public forum 

in Sydney. And in invoking a resounding ‘no’ she hints at the possible gains of risking 

failure and rejection that we in turn find in Patrick Flores’s piece Object Lessons from 

his experience as one of the curators of the recent Gwangju Biennale, or even in Joselina 

Cruz’s “dismal” rate of success in resisting the baggage that came with becoming one of 

three curators of the 2008 SAB. This vacuum-visibilitty dilemma is not at all a monopoly 

of the visual arts as seen in the continuing tangling for the ‘indie label’ among those 

genuinely interested in crafting an alternative film language and those merely looking for 

a quick buck. And yet we have not even begun to talk about how ‘going international’ 

has become a definite route toward earning a local audience upon a film’s homecoming 

post-festival roadtrip. By going straight to auction, are the visual artists merely following 

suit? On what terms do we attempt to engage? 

Perhaps undeniably so, this question about making sense of art in such uncloyingly 

reductionist terms is never going to be going the way of rocket science. And this is even 


amidst such utopic conditions as full disclosure (who is collecting what and why should 

they be inhibiting themselves from specific venues for valuation—exhibit programming, 

judging, etc.) and a seamless information system that allows contending ideas to get to 

the people who need to hear and digest them most. Leung speaks of how art is ‘rudderless’ 

particularly in the ideal world where the ultimate arbiters would be the makers of art 

themselves who might in fact choose to be intractable. But hope floats or all artmaking 

would cease. Thus the only tenable way to keep the artworld honest would be if all agents 

would enter into the fray, boldly if not inerrantly speak rather than succumb to merely 

working out of each other’s comfy and self-interested nests. There are no pat answers 

but at least attempting to journey toward them is genuine gain. 

irene s. leung 

What Does “Recovery” Look Like 

in the Art World? Or Surviving 

the Next Art Market Bubble 

News about General Motors re-emerging out of bankruptcy in just one month sent all 

the media pundits scrambling for words. With 27,000 fewer employees and 13 fewer 

car plants, it somehow acquired a new sheen—“smaller, leaner, tougher.” I for one, feel 

that we are all our own individual GM companies—we have become leaner and tougher 

through the hard times. But is there a comparable example in the art world? 

With the overnight vanishing of wealth and the near-collapse of the credit markets, 

some, like Holland Cotter, art critic of the New York Times, breathed a sigh of relief that 

artists are once again left alone to make art rather than being picked over by “cadres 

of public relations specialists” (i.e. the critics, curators, editors, publishers and career 

theorists) driven by dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and…event planners. 1 

Granted, the art world has not and will probably never embrace speculative investment. 

But surely some of us would miss the frequent art fairs and biennales. Yet who is to say 

when the stock market eventually rebounds to irrational exuberance, that the critics, 

collectors, financiers, and dealers won’t contrive to create the next art market bubble? 

Which art works would become the darling of the market? Which country would be 

the hotbed of new talents? Who will be the new investors willing to inflate the next art 

market bubble? 

Given that everyone seems to be waiting for a sign to see where the wind blows, the 

key question is not so much about how to do away with market agents because speculators 

and investors are here to stay, but how art world depends on its rich patrons and has 

worked hard to influence what they think and how they invest. We are not speaking of 

having a Cosimo de’ Medici, but the art world has depended on the collectors, donors, 

and corporations to keep it alive. What has been missing is a robust debate about monetization 

– where does art practice intersect with money? Art needs an account balance 

sheet because art is livelihood. Art is also a subsidy because the art market only supports 

a small percentage of artists very well while others do not receive much. 

The editors of this issue of Ctrl+P have rightly pointed out the interconnectedness 

of ‘art world’ and the ‘art market.’ One simply cannot exist without the other, yet the art 

market and the art world play by very different rules and thrive on different stimulants. As 

artists and arts professionals, we seem to always be on the defensive, constantly justifying 

the role of arts in society. Why must the arts be seen as expendable as corporate jets 

in times of financial crises? Why are the utilities of arts constantly being questioned, as 

opposed to, say, Math and sciences? On the other hand, the mantra of “art for arts sake” 

actually undermines the extraordinarily diverse and complex reasons why we make art 

and pay for the arts; it denies the social, religious and political functions that the arts 

serve in human history and continues to do so. 


Ostensibly, much of the art market hype could be blamed on the media. Damien Hirst 

makes headline news, but much else of the contemporary art world has been confined to 

the art world itself. Could we honestly say the art world has bothered to explain itself to 

the rest of the world? Instead, it has relied on the ‘public relations specialists’ to compete 

for the hearts and minds of art collectors. Working artists, and especially community arts 

groups, suffer the most from the likes of Charles Saatchi and his public relations machinery. 

Even as the argument that the arts create jobs and bolster the economy has been 

floating around for decades, it would soon become a cliché because many could say the 

same about the auto industry or Wall Street. 2 Would the government ever say that the 

art world needs a bail out because it is ‘too big to fail’? (Remember U.S. government 

owns 61% of General Motors now?) Would art world’s collapse cause ‘systemic risk’ to 

the rest of the world? 

Putting the Arts on Trial 

What I’d like to explore is whether we have we become too accustomed to the inevitability 

of arts’ existence that we justify it through faith alone? The tangled argument 

about the arts could be gleaned from a recent public debate held by Intelligence Squared 

US (IQ2US) that asked: “Is the art market less moral than the stock market?” (3 February 

2009) The side that argued against the motion—represented by artist Chuck Close, 

art critic Jerry Saltz, and auctioneer Amy Capellazzo—lost the debate. In retrospect, the 

defenders kept trying to explain the value of the art but could not defend the operations 

of the art market, which is the key issue of the debate. They believe in art so much that 

they were ill equipped to speak for the art market. Moreover, associating art with morality 

somehow ended up putting the art world—not the art market—on trial. 

It was an interesting twist of logic, for it was not because the organizers of the 

IQ2US debate were not aware that ‘markets’ do not operate by ‘morals.’ The debate’s 

chair and its main funder, Robert Rosenkranz, asserts in his opening statement that secrecy 

and manipulation makes the art market less ethical than the stock market. His argument 

goes like this: there are rules against insider trading in the stock market, but not in the 

art market, he said, “the art market is advertising prices at auction that are not real, that 

are intended really to deceive people about the true state of the market.” 

First of all, art does not behave in the same way as other commodities. Chuck Close 

said he hates to see dealers “talk about art as if they were selling hog futures. It’s another 

kind of business.” This is precisely the issue: art is a completely different kind of business—one 

that is infinitely more diverse and complex than any other businesses in the 

world. Thus, it seems disingenuous for Rosenkranz to throw in the red herring that there 

is a ‘real price’ in the art market. 

Rosenkranz could not possibly frame the debate question out of ignorance of the 

complexity of market functions—for he has made his fortune in private equity investment. 

Also, he is an avid collector of contemporary art and is married to Alexandra Munroe, 

Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim. Rosenkranz would know that the art 

market does not function as market in the classical sense —where prices heavily depend on 

the equilibrium of supply and demand as well as ‘perfect information’ on the market. 

In fact, it has been asserted by an economist that the art marketing process is 

“rudderless.” As a result, “the imperfection of the available information on prices and 

transactions does not matter in the sense that better information about the behavior of the 

market really would not help anyone to make decisions more effectively.” 3 Rosenkranz 

would know very well that pitching the terms “real prices” and “true state of the market” 

as normative statements was misleading at best. Moreover, the three people who won 

the debate (who were art dealers and collectors) explicitly stated that they do not want 

to see the art market regulated. Again, why complain about the ‘lack of morals’ if they 

actually don’t want the rules changed? 

One wonders if this IQUS2 debate was an insidious plot to discourage future investors 

in contemporary art. For these collectors and dealers know full well the benefits of 

being free from state interference. Writer and documentary filmmaker Ben Lewis explains 

why contemporary art is “an ideal vehicle for speculative euphoria.” 


Governments have had little interest in regulating the trinkets and playthings 

of the super-rich. Art works are a uniquely portable and confidential form of 

wealth. Whereas all property purchases have to be publicly registered, buying 

art is a private activity. And unlike old masters, which are often linked by 

history to specific places, contemporary art knows no frontiers. 4 

Take for example, in the midst of the financial market bubble, the art market inflation 

was ridiculously exaggerated: the Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang saw his work 

appreciate 6,000 times, from $1,000 to $6 million between 1999-2008; while the American 

artist Richard Prince’s work went up 60 to 80 times between 2003-2008. 5 

In some ways, the art market behaves more like executive salaries than the stock 

market. In appearance, both the arts and executive salaries seem to be based on merit 

—but the ratio between merit and performance is actually very opaque. 

The number is actually “a signaling mechanism,” explains Seth Godin, a marketing 

expert, regarding the myth of big executive salaries. In order to solicit the best and the 

brightest, firms compete with each other by engineering a salary structure that attempts 

to bid higher than a competing firm. Moreover, these firms have a board of directors 

consisting of executives from other companies, so the salaries of this elite group keep 

paying each other higher and higher salaries that explode out of proportion compared to 

salaries of other employees in the same company. 

The similarities go further. As executive salaries have been disconnected from performance, 

so has the value of art been disconnected with other known indicatorsof value. 

In a sobering and sometimes sarcastic essay written by Donald Kuspit, an art historian 

and philosopher, he points out how the irrational exuberance was less about the value of 

art than it was about the value of money: 

The intrinsic value of these paintings has, whatever it is…never [made] them 

more valuable than the extrinsic value [at which they were acquired] by reason 

of their exchange value, that is, the money that becomes their equivalent. 

More crucially, recognized by money, they can no longer be recognized for 

what they artistically are. Nor can they be questioned and put in historical 

perspective... The price paid for a work of art becomes its absolute and 

authoritative value, even if the value the price implies is not particularly 

clear. It is presented without explanation—the price is the explanation. 6 

Fueled by the illusive promise of exorbitant returns, the art market lost its justification 

for art and became a market of markets. What Ben Lewis calls “specullecting” by 

the likes of Charles Saatchi may be all too common as an integral part of the art world 

now. In the late 1990s Saatchi bought the work of young artists, established a museum 

in which to display it, lent it to public museums, and used his celebrity status to attract 

media attention. He then sold part of his collection at auctions. The works then came to 

be associated with the celebrity collector, diminishing the value of the art itself. 

Anyone who thinks that all they need to do is to try to outsmart the art market may 

have random success at best. There have been countless studies by economists showing 

the low rate of return on art if one were to use it as investment. Analysis of historical 

data from 1650 to 1960 shows that the real annual rate of return was 0.5% on paintings 

as compared to 2.5% on government bonds. Another figure was slightly more optimistic, 

but similar—2% real returns on paintings compared to 3.3% real interest rate of the 

Bank of England. 7 

This figure is dismal for investors, but what about the figure for working artists? 

In his misguided defense of the art world (rather than the art market) in the IQ2US debate, 

Jerry Saltz says “1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of artists actually make money. And even 

they barely do and usually only for a very short time.” This adds another dimension to 

our picture – do artists actually benefit from the art market? If not, then how could they 

make a living in spite of the monstrous alliance between the art world and the financial 


market? If we cannot do away with over zealous investors and “specullectors,” how 

should the art world brace for the next art market bubble? What are some of the ways 

to negotiate such an imperfect rewards system? In our ever-changing consumer culture 

where we have come to rely on rankings, ratings, pricing, and reckless search for ‘perfect 

information,’ how do enduring artistic values get through this plethora of chatter and 

public relation games? 

The Reward System for the Arts 

The art world is savvy enough not to stick its heads into the sand by avoiding the fact 

that art needs to be monetized somehow—we are not facing up to the fact that as artists 

and arts professions, we all have to translate the act of producing (and writing about) art 

into livelihoods. All of us participate in some form of ‘monetization’ because we expect 

to be compensated directly or indirectly from the arts. The arts are heterogeneous—some 

are self-sustaining while others rely on a support structure (i.e. public/private funding, 

paying audiences). If we count music recording, architecture, film, and design as part of 

the art world, then these are fine examples of the arts being able to sustain themselves 

through a business model. But performing arts and visual arts have different challenges 

in the era of shrinking public and private investment. The arts thrive with the injection 

of money, but the market goes through random cycles that do not always reward creativity 

and ideas. So how may we make sense of the reward system? What might be ways 

to expand it? How do we reconceptualize value creation to seek new connectivities and 

re-examine our expectations? 

First, let’s re-examine the issue of the costs of art. William Baumol, one of the 

very first scholars who used economic analysis to the arts as an industry, co-authored a 

book entitled Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (1966). From the perspective of 

classical economists, the arts, especially performing arts such as live music or theatre, 

belong to the “technologically unprogressive industries.” Using performing arts as a 

starting point, Baumol points to the gap between financing performances in the face of 

inevitable rising unit costs because it is unable to adapt and evolve with technology to 

make it more efficient or cost effective. Not only that live performing arts do not pay 

for themselves, but that they would show deficits of increasing size over time. This is 

what is known as “Baumol’s cost disease”—a concept that seems to have been all but 

forgotten in the arts literature. Subsequent studies in the 1980s and 1990s show that the 

book’s prediction was not entirely correct because ticket prices rose much faster than the 

general price level without causing a drop in attendance. On the other hand, performing 

arts companies have been cutting costs by reducing the number of artists who perform 

to cut down on labor costs. Since ticket prices do not match the real cost of the performance, 

companies resort to subsidies either from the government or from private donors. 

By relying on subsidies, according to classical economic theory, this prevents market 

prices from reflecting their true costs. 8 

This actually brings us back to the beginning of the essay about needing better 

arguments for the arts. The arts are not unique as a ‘stagnant sector.’ Schools, hospitals, 

and service industries suffer the same fate—wages for these sectors would keep widening 

despite the rise in wages across the board for other sectors. The theory goes, “sooner 

or later, the price of concerts, art galleries, haircuts, restaurants meals, college courses, 

hospital beds, etc. must move steadily upward, so that by the year 2010 or 2020 or 2030 

consumers will be spending 30, 40, 50% of their budgets on schooling, medical care, 

and personal services in general.” 9 

This is a sobering reality because schools and hospitals are accepted as integral 

parts of social welfare. The wage gap is widening for the arts, but it is stuck between a 

dysfunctional art market on the one hand, and not being able to fully convince anyone 

that it is a public good. In the United States, the advocacy group Americans for the Arts 

just won a temporary battle to override the Senate’s vote by putting $50 million back 

into President Obama’s stimulus bill targeted for the National Endowment for the Arts. 10 


The war is not over, as they say. In the mean time, private and corporate donors step 

in to subsidize the true costs—but only during good economic times, and usually with 

fickle board members or narrow grant guidelines. Moreover, most donors do not provide 

long-term support, and usually do not work closely with arts groups to create sustainable 

programs or develop income streams. From the grantseekers’ point of view, much effort 

has to be put into cultivating donors despite limited staff time and resources. 

Could the art world ever bare its true costs? It has always struggled with the precarious 

nature of its own un-sustainability. Moreover, politicians exploit this fissure by 

calling attention to controversial art that has received public funding. The politicization 

further distracts us from a robust debate about the values of art in society—the arts’ 

heterogeneity makes it especially difficult to have a coherent voice and an improved set 

of rationales. On the other hand, the reward system for the arts is not likely to change 

without concerted efforts on the part of the advocates. 

Endnotes 

1. H. Cotter, “The Boom is Over, Long 

Live the Art!” New York Times, 

15 February 2009. 

2. G. Sandow, “The Arts need a Better 

Argument,” The Wall Street Journal, 18 

February 2009. 

3. W. Baumol, “Unnatural Value: or Art 

Investment as Floating Crap Game,” 

AEA Papers and Proceedings 76.2 (May 

1986), 10-14. 

4. B. Lewis, “The Second Tulip Mania,” 

Prospect Magazine, Dec 2008. 

5. Cited by B. Lewis. 

6. D. Kuspit, “Art Values or Market 

Values,” artnet, March 2007. 

7. B. Frey, “Art Markets and Economics: 

An Introduction,” Journal of Cultural 

Economics 21(1997): 165-173. 

8. J. Heilbrun, “Baumol’s Cost Disease,” 

in Ruth Towse, Handbook of Cultural 

Economics (2003). 

9. M. Blaug, “Final Comments on the 

Plenary Session on Baumol and Bowen,” 

Journal of Cultural Economics 20 (1996): 

249-250. 

10. G. Sandow (2009). 

Can the Art World Recover? 

I realize this essay states the problem in different ways rather than give answers. But 

even if there were a Yellow Brick Road, the Wizard of Oz is nothing more than a quack 

hiding behind smoke screens and tricks. Since the art market has mostly hijacked arts’ 

reward system and subsidies are not easily obtained with fuzzy justifications, let us turn 

to the issue of value creation. On behalf of art’s defense during IQ2US debate, Chuck 

Close asserts that, “Art is a meritocracy. It is a meritocracy because the final arbiters of 

what is important are other artists. All the hype, all the spin, all the effort to construct a 

career out of thin air, all the efforts to manipulate the market notwithstanding.” 

In many ways, the art world that Chuck Close describes is the ideal world when 

artists have stable income and their pensions are secured and they would live without 

critics, curators, editors, publishers, dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and 

event planners. But consider for a moment if artists could become better arbiters, what 

would this alternate art world look like? What sort of platform would allow artists to 

function better as each other’s arbiters? 

In most industries, competition engenders innovation and spurs productivity. Lessons 

from recent history tell us that moments of creative fervor come in waves and despite 

the fact that they were brief and quickly co-opted by the mainstream—these moments 

usually happen when artists work with each other rather than chase after the art market. 

In the 1970s in New York, Holland Cotter recalls: “…the energy was collective, but the 

mix was different…everybody did everything—painting, writing, performing, filming, 

photocopying zines, playing in bands—and new forms arrived, including hip-hop, graffiti, 

No Wave cinema, appropriation art and the first definable body of “out” queer art. So did 

unusual ways of exhibiting work: in cars, in bathrooms, in subways.” 

We are obviously not going to turn the clock backwards as if the same magic formula 

still works. For 2010 and beyond, it shall be a different story. Maybe it is time that we take 

a different look at what is making the world turn now. How could the arts communicate 

better with different sectors of the society? Are there lessons to be learned from the green 

revolution? Are there lessons to be learned from the infectious microfinance movement 

made famous by Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunnus? What about open source software? 

An exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum entitled “Design for the other 90%” showed 

how we often forget that 90% of the world’s population have little or no access to products 

and services many of us take for granted. Nearly half of this disadvantaged population 

does not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter. So why shouldn’t the arts 

help imagine and create different futures for everyone? 

10 Ctrl+P September 2009

gina fairley 

Reframing the Biennale:2010 

“If history starts to become something that can be thrown open to debate 

only when it has been recreated and recast in narrative form by historians 

[and I would add curators], should we look at the validity of the language 

that gives it force…” - Levent Çalikoglu 1 

Weekend crowds at SHcontemporary08 

Art Fair, Shanghai. 

Photo credits: Gina Fairley 

This quote by Turkish curator Levent Çalikoglu has a currency with this issue of Ctrl+P 

and its dissection of the biennale as a global phenomenon. But more pointedly, it points 

to a recasting of ‘narrative’ as the geography of the biennale has changed suturing, if you 

like, its very ability to immerse contemporary art practice within a city and its audience 

with an equally recent phenomenon, the Asian art market. How these exhibitions broker 

notions of truth, geopolitics and culture as collateral to redefining perception and value 

requires examination. 

We all know the biennale was born with Venice in 1895. It is not its eurocentricity 

or position as the exemplary grand dame that interests me, rather its roots as a tourism 

initiative of the day. It is almost as though we have gone through the full motion of an 

inverted bell-curve, returning to that wide arching popularism with expo-style exhibitions 

hell-bent on attendance figures and crowd pleasers in the face of widespread competition. 

As the sociologist Pascal Gielen observes, “Afterall, [the biennale] fits easily in a 

neo-liberal city marketing strategy of so-called ‘creative cities’.” 2 

To compound this state of crisis, the biennale today is caught between a schizophrenic 

ricochet between the institutional white cube and the raw (un)familiar site, which 

has increasingly become a marketing chip to identifying and growing these events to 

local and international audiences. Layer that with a trend to package these exhibitions 

with other events and, understandably, their critical edges start to blur. Just look at the 

most blatant example, the curated art fair Showcase Singapore housed within the biennale 

venue of City Hall. Is it ‘selling-out’ or ‘buying-in’? Furthermore, Singapore has 

established a trend to pair its biennale with spectacular events such as the World Monetary 

Fund meeting, the inaugural Formula 1 or the Youth Olympics in 2010. It pivots 

on the marketing concept of ‘added value’ where the sincere idealism 

of curatorial themes has been usurped by opportunism as their modus 

operandi. Is this simply an equation of accountability in today’s climate 

where funding sponsors and governments hold the ultimate strings? Or 

is it a more astute understanding of their primary audience post-vernissage? 

As Çalikoglu suggests, ‘…we should look at the validity of the 

language that gives it force.’ 

Crowds versus crisis 

Hong Kong’s Asian Art Archive reports that today, there are over 

60 international biennials and triennials, the overwhelming majority 

of which began during the 1990s. 3 By my count, 25 of those are/were 

events held in Asia; that is more than one third and growing. That says 

more about these locations than the art they are showing. Take China 

for example. Before 1996 it didn’t have a single biennale; it reportedly 

now has seven. ArtZineChina’s report continues, “Four years ago 

there was only one art district—the 798 in Beijing; now seven cities 

around this country have art districts and Beijing alone enjoys nine art 

districts. Art Galleries grew from less than 30 five years ago to at least 

300 at present. And five years ago, no more than five auction houses 

dealt with contemporary art, now at least fifty auctions houses have 

stepped into the contemporary art market…[In China] 70% of all collectors 

have emerged in only the last two years.” 4 This is definitely a 

growth industry. 


Installation view “Best of Discovery”, 

SHcontemporary08 art fair, Shanghai 


Jing Shijian (China).“Express 

Train: Shanghai Biennale Station” 

(2008). Train car, rail, sleepers, 

video, 45 tonnes. Installation view 

7th Shanghai Biennale, 2008 


This explosion is not specific to China. Between 2006 and 2008 the number of art 

fairs rocketed with 50 held in 2008 alone; 21 of those were held in Asia. Former Editor 

at Art Asia Pacific Andrew Maerkle notes that, “…galleries from the Asia-Pacific region 

still represent less than 1% of international art fair exhibitors.” 5 

While this statistic may be true it does not reflect the number 

of Asian artists shown at these events, regardless of the location 

of the gallery. 

What is more interesting than the global power structures 

of art fairs is the way they are redefining themselves, bridging 

if you like, biennales and auctions with curated components 

and commissioned works by ‘celebrity artists’ featured within 

their selling halls. Shanghai’s SHContemporary, for example, 

calls theirs “Best of Discovery.” The choice of name says it all 

playing off the speculation or savvy discovery of the new that 

has skewed the market of recent years. It is a curious tension 

between elite market drivers and popular interest. 

And with the growing trend of biennales and triennials 

to commission work for institutional collections—one only 

has to recall that the Fifth Asia Pacific Triennial commissioned 

or acquired 70% of its works prior to the exhibition’s 

opening—one ponders whether next we will have the ‘buying 

biennale’? One might even ask whether the biennale has 

hijacked contemporary art making, so thoroughly massaged and hyped that they have 

backed themselves into a corner of staged dialogues and price tickets, and art fairs are 

quickly filling the fissures. 

A further interesting trend is the shift in several of these Asian events from a locally 

focused survey of the ‘new’ addressing their own art scene to become International exhibitions 

turning towards global trends. Shanghai, Guangzhou, Taipei, Busan, Gwangju, 

Yogyakarta and Jakarta have all made this shift, the most recent being the XIII Jakarta 

Biennale just this February despite starting in the 1960s as a painting show. It indicates 

to me where these art scenes are setting their sites. 

Yongwoo Lee of last year’s Gwangju Biennale, however, disagrees. He speaks 

of Korea’s embrace of this biennalisation: “The biennale culture of Korea has already 

accumulated 13 years of experience and is constantly expanding, quantitatively. I do 

not believe that it comes from the system of the biennale or structure 

of global production it conveys...I anticipate the emergence of a new 

ideology and international styles of art in the niches of the economic 

crisis and recess.” 6 

Lee believes the needs and local desires of individual nations are 

driving this beast. If the impact of the GEC can be weathered by these 

events and offer a reshuffling the deck of speculators, their 2010 versions 

will be the real barometer to their longevity as a vital curatorial model. 

It begs the old question to again be asked: Who really are these Asian 

biennales for and how do we filter their curatorial choices? 

Remapping/geopolitics 

2008 was the year to catch the Asian biennale and I managed to do 

my share, regularly opting to see these exhibitions outside the ‘opening 

week caravan.’ What became apparent to me were two very different 

experiences of the same exhibition: One attempting to satisfy global art 

vernacular; the other trying to grow these events to a local population. 

What currency does the voice of the nomadic curator have to this 

local population, where he or she steps centre stage for a short moment? 

As ‘the biennale’ has been deployed across cities and regions, these events 

increasingly are brokered on themes of social responsibility as witness to 


Visitor’s watching video work at 

Shanghai Biennale 2008. 


the boom of new engagement. The ‘political issue’ is inserted into their artistic agenda 

to in order to counter their genericism with local triggers. But do they become staged 

dialogues as a result? How can such themes bridge the cultural gaps between China, 

Havana and Sydney erstwhile catering to a local appetite? Perhaps the only way to do so 

is to bring them closer the endorsement of the global art market. Writer Jorinde Seijdel 

sums it up in his question, “…can biennials really represent an alternative political voice 

in these neo-political times?” 7 

Take for example the work Michael Rakowitz in the last Biennale of Sydney in 

the vestibule of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Titled “White man got no dreaming” 

(2008) it is a model of Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International” 

using found materials from ‘the block’, the iconic site of urban Aboriginal Australia 

in the Sydney suburb of Redern. Rakowitz marries Tatlin’s symbol of revolutionary, 

visionary architecture of 1919 with Aboriginal housing, itself a failed ideal. Its presence 

in the AGNSW as symbol of white power is clear. However, the problem arises in that 

this piece overlays white ideals on black Australia and a culturally-specific issue that 

has nothing to do with the American Rakowitz. While a clever connection with Carolyn 

Christov-Bakargiev’s theme “Revolutions that turn,” one wonders whether it is more 

about contrived tensions endemic to ‘biennale art’ than contemporary revolution. 

This choice of curators to frame their exhibitions around historical or politically 

charged sites using them as a pawn to a reaction is not exclusive to Christov-Bakargiev—it 

has become the norm. Such tactics then beg the question in the light of Levent’s quote at 

the opening of this article, what is the more accurate narrative or truth: the contemporary 

reality of the site or the reality constructed by the works? What could be argued is that 

biennales today are caught in a curatorial style that the art critic Gardner calls ‘google 

mulching: type in the word and see what graces the screen’. They have become overworked 

lessons in connectivity. Recall this run of works that Hou Hanru juxtaposed in the 10th 

Istanbul Biennale: Hamra Abbas’ karma sutra warriors and Huang Yong Ping’s minaret 

missile with AES+F’s grunge-glamour war-scape “Last Riot” and David Ter-Organyan’s 

domestic bombs. Little is left to the imagination. We are left with formulaic contemporary 

works playing out prescribed geo-political and religious tensions. 

So why the necessity to force these exhibitions? Is it for press attention, curatorial 

indulgence, competitive edge or public awe? What could be argued is that these exhibitions 

have become microcosms of an idea that is quickly usurped by locals once the art 

entourage has passed. It is a swift shift from polished rhetoric to mobile-phone-moments 

later to be posted on Facebook. The spectacular of the photo opportunity has replaced that 

of political hype. It is a very different engagement that has the same contemporary status 

as the latest must-have Gucci bag. This synergy is perhaps best illustrated by the scale 

of Beijing’s art gulches or, a more specific example, 

Shanghai Gallery of Art’s ritzy location in the same 

building as the elite boutiques of Armani and Hugo 

Boss along Shanghai’s fashionable Bund area. In the 

words of academic Thomas Berghuis: “The power of 

cultural capital lies in its trouble-free expenditure, in 

its potential to be easily consumed. Chinese art now 

is comparable to Chinese takeaway: quick stir-fries, 

suitable to all tastes” 8 

Has the audience attention span become that 

eroded it needs constant stimulation or does this clutter 

of spectacular and scale and reflect a different reading 

of space within Asia where societies are more densely 

compacted? It is an interesting question and one that 

should be considered outside Western museological 

standards. 

What struck me most visiting Shanghai Biennale 

was the number of people clustered around the video 


Poklong Anading. “Untitled (caskets)” 

Detail. Clear cast resin. XIII Jakarta 

Biennale 2009. Venue: Grand Indonesia. 

Image courtesy the artist. 

installations, diligently watching them from start to finish. They 

were hungry for this media. Maybe it indicates a generational shift; 

most artists working today have only known a life with mobile 

phones, music videos and computers. Should we then be so critical 

of their fracture within an exhibition environment, when it is 

clearly a mapping of now? 

Next time you go to a biennale take a look at the audience as 

much as the art; it is only in understanding this that we can face 

these exhibitions with a more appropriate criticality. This idea 

brings and returns us to art fairs and the kind of hunger that feeds 

and fuses contemporary art events in our current global climate. 

I was astounded to see crowds snaking their way around the museum 

waiting to get in to view the Shanghai Biennale just days 

after record crowds had attended SHcontemporary art fair with the 

vigour of a flower or motor show as a popular weekend outing. 

The contemporary art audience is being redefined and perhaps so 

too are these events to reflect this. I recently gave a lecture on this 

topic at the National Art School in Sydney and a student asked, “Is 

audience a dirty word?” Is it? I would profess it is king because 

without an engaged audience these art works fall hollow. 

Notes: 

1. Levent Çalikoglu, catalogue essay, 

“We are history’s hybrids” for the 

exhibition Hybrid Narratives at Akbank 

Sanat, Istanbul [Turkey], September 2007 

2. Pascal Gielen, “The Biennale: 

A Post-Institution for Immaterial Labour” 

published in in Open; http://www.skor. 

nl/article-4113-en.html 

3. Asian Art Archive, http://www.aaa.org. 

hk/onlineprojects/bitri/en/index.aspx 

4. Zhu Gi’s article from ArtZineChina 

published in Art in Asia No. 8, 2008, 

pp. 158-159. 

5. Art Asia Pacific Alamanc 2009, p. 88. 

6. Yongwoo Lee, “Discourse production 

frame and biennale culture”, published in 

Art in Asia (Korea), Jan 09, p. 68. 

7. Jorinde Seijdel, editorial Open5, 2009, 

http://www.skor.nl/article-4058-en.html] 

8. Thomas J. Berghuis, “China: We 

Love You!”, Ctrl+P, Issue No. 11, 

March 08, p. 30. 

9. Dana Friis-Hansen,TransCulture 

catalogue essay p114, published in Lee 

Weng Choy’s article “A Taste for Worms 

and Roses,” Published by Artspace 

Sydney critical issues series 7, 2006. p. 9. 

10. Brian Holmes http://www.skor.nl/article-4112-en.html 

1997 : 2008 : 2010 

The American curator Dana Friss-Hansen wrote, “…[work] 

which often engages the metaphoric possibilities of common, locally available objects, 

reflects upon the shifting constructions of order, categories, and meaning—part of the 

complex, layered experience of so many Asian lives.” (9.) 

While Friss-Hansen was specifically referring to the work of artist Simryn Gill, it 

has a synergy to this conversation and to works such as Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s 

that adapt well to a biennale vernacular for their ability to touch local audiences and 

more recently, Poklong Anading’s work in the XIII Jakarta Biennale (JB09). Anading’s 

installation at the Grand Indonesia Mall expanded his “Casket” series (2008-09), discarded 

packaging cast in resin. In the context of this ritzy Western-styled mall, Anading 

challenged notions of reuse and aspirational society, a pun presented as a ‘climbing 

wall.’ And with the fading trend of the past decade to place galleries within malls, it also 

comments on the commodification of art. JB09 gets it right in the placement of work 

specific to its audiences and venues and with great clarity its curators also tackled the 

commodification of the biennale. 

In the light of today’s economic crisis it should be remembered that it was the 

economic and geopolitical conditions following the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis under 

which most of these Asian biennales were formed and flourished. My curiosity is perked 

to see what the 2010 editions of these events will present with a winding back of budgets 

and deflating spectacular. I return to the question I posed at the start of this article: as the 

market recedes but popular interest in contemporary art continues to have a ferocious 

appetite across Asia, how will these events morph and fuse to cater to popular demands? 

To conclude with Brian Holmes statement, “Neoliberalism is dead. Now we have to wake 

up to the world of regions” 10 seems most apt. 


eliza tan 

The 53rd Venice Biennale 

Fare Mondi, Making Worlds 

Venice, 5 June 2009—High tide has submerged a width of pavement near the Rialto, 

where one of the Venice Biennale opening parties was held just the night before. A 

woman squeals at the novelty of the sight and has her souvenir picture taken against a 

misty backdrop of looming piazzi and vaporettos chugging across the dark canal. Stray 

groups of tourists loiter around the detritus-strewn square, fresh beers in hand, ready for 

yet another night of revelry. “What a pre-apocalyptical vision.” A friend turns to me to 

suggest, pointing to a distant piazzo from which strange blue lights and blaring dance 

music emanates. “It’s almost as if everyone’s out to have their last hoorah in this postcard 

city, this fast-sinking skeleton of a nostalgic world.” 

Richard Wentworth. Untitled (2009) 

at the Arsenale. Photo credits: Eliza Tan 

Curated Sections: The Arsenale and the Giardini 

Rescuing the observable present for the future is Director Daniel Birmbaum’s 

prescription for this year’s Venice Biennale: “When Fare Mondi, Making Worlds brings 

back expressions from a recent past, it is never for nostalgic reasons but in order to 

find tools for the future and to make possible new beginnings.” Nostalgia aside, such a 

curatorial agenda delivers no surprises from the outset. The utopian impulse underlying 

Birmbaum’s statement rings like an old adage, coupled with all too familiar rhetoric on 

art production in a state of globalization. Making Worlds addresses the relevant but in 

a far too sweeping and general sense without actually inspiring anything perspectivally 

fresh or, for lack of a better word, ‘new’; more of an emphasis could also be made on the 

re-making, and not just making of worlds. In this respect, Robert Storr for the previous 

biennale, had adopted a far more triumphant and tempered approach with Think with the 

Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense, challenging a re-adjustment of our 

attitudes towards art, the non-linearity of history and contemporaneity. 

To Birmbaum’s credit, the curated segments of the Arsenale and Giardini flow at a 

good pace, providing narrative roundness and accessibility. The exhibition at the Arsenale 

begins and ends neatly with Anya Zholud’s site-specific installation and drawings, 

which quietly expose the building’s electric cables, allowing invisible communication 

processes to assume a materiality. The overall tone of the exhibition remains clean and 

consistent throughout, with a modest but solid selection of works which mostly shy 

away from ostentation. It is likely that this owes partially to the $1.4 million biennale 

budget cut this year, but it is quite a relief 

to see a somewhat less spectacular biennale 

for a change, where works can just ‘be’, in 

concert with a privileging of ideas and forms. 

Richard Wentworth’s phenomenological 

experiment with walking sticks on glass 

panes, for instance, exemplifies a restrained 

elegance and poetic pragmatism, as does 

Ceal Floyer’s concise and deceptively simple 

Overgrowth, a magnified projection of the 

miniature Bonsai tree. 

Even larger scaled works appear reserved; 

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s roomful 

of ornately framed mirrors, the relics of his 

performance Seventeen Less One where the 

artist smashed the surfaces with a mallet, 

makes a strong but not radical impact. Lygia 

15 Ctrl+P September 2009

Pape’s rare Ttéia I, C , comprising of translucent blocks of curtained light in a pitch dark 

room won the artist a special mention under the Re-making Worlds prize category, and 

is an exquisite visual treat. Displaced quotidian matter and events otherwise make up 

the material of works such as Tamara Gricic’s life rafts, floating outside the Arsenale to 

its own soundtrack, or Sara Ramo’s video of a series of little events unfolding against a 

non-descript red brick wall. 

At times, works seemed too directly illustrative of Making Worlds, or too literal; 

Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Human Being, a hybrid re-creation of a small African village, 

is one example. Anawana Haloba’s street advertising kiosk, which addresses the double 

standards of G8 foreign aid policies and free trade agreements, comes across as an ambiguous 

crossover between a DIY project and make-shift recycling centre. In contrast, 

Gonkar Gyatso’s The Shambala in Modern Times, a re-presentation of traditional Thangka 

paintings using “cutesy” stickers and icons of popular culture, combines visual innovation 

with subtle, yet effective social-political commentary. 

Paul Chan’s captivating Sade for Sade’s Sake in the Arsenale revives the ancient 

theatre of rhythmic shadow-play in his invocation of the Marquis de Sade’s writing. 

This concept is elsewhere reiterated, albeit to a different effect, in Hans Peter Feldman’s 

mesmerizing Shadow Play in The Palazzo at the Giardini. On the overall, the placement, 

pairings and juxtaposition of works across both the Arsenale and Giardini establishes 

relatively neat symmetries and there is some satisfaction to be derived from such curatorial 

coherence, even if this transpires into a bland presentation. 

National Pavilions 

Artists’ showcases from participating countries proved, as usual, to be the mainstay 

of opening day discussions. Setting the stage for Miwa Yanagi’s darkly ambivalent and 

uncanny Windswept Women: The Old Girl’s Troupe, an unreservedly hysterical affront to 

the proverbial, libidinally-driven “old boys club,” is a black, carnivalesque tent shrouding 

the Japan Pavilion. Inside the tent, giant-sized black-and-white photographs of monstrous 

looking women with twisted bodies shriek and stomp against what appears to be primitive-futuristic 

landscape. A miniature version of the black tent sits in a corner, and one 

is invited to stoop and peer in to watch a video of this nomadic tribe, outcasts performing 

their private rituals. Compared to the highly color-saturated, futuristic fantasy of Yanagi’s 

perfectly manicured and uniformed Elevator Girls from the mid-90s, “pretty” is clearly not 

the point here. A surreal but memorable installation tethering on the bizarre, Windswept 

Women plunges into the fictional re-creation of society and power hierarchies, extending 

also the theatrical macabre of Yanagi’s Fairy Tale series, an inversion of stories such as 

Snow White and Cinderella. 

Presentations from Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand return perennially, and inescapably 

so, to current affairs on tourism, immigration and identity. The Thai Pavilion’s 

mock tourism company made a rather sketchy and unconvincing impression compared 

to the delicate yet gravitatious presentation by Nipan Oranniwesna and Amrit Chusuwan 

in 2007. Works in the Taiwan Pavilion, on the other hand, compellingly confront issues 

regarding the nation’s status in relation to China, housing conditions, immigration processes 

and the interplay of ideological stances against a backdrop of neo-liberalist globalization. 

Communicating such concerns through personalized expressions and individual 

narratives, the works provide a timely and pertinent investigation into the possibilities 

of cross-regional interactions or ‘dialogism,’ as curator Chang Fang-wei cites. Foreign 

Affairs not only sparks further consideration of the collisions and confluences of intraregional 

and inter-continental movement, the presentation also demonstrates the modes 

of artistic exchange deriving from such conversation. 

Through an excavation of local cinematic history, Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation 

at the Singapore Pavilion attempts to unpack the singularity of officialised narratives on 

multi-culturalism while also referring to unspoken yet still persistent cultural stereotypes 

and stigmatisms. The photographs of demolished theatres, Wong Han Ming’s archive 

of old cinema tickets and the canvases painted by the last surviving billboard painter in 

Singapore, Neo Chon Teck, succeed in evoking a recognisable sense of 50s-60s nostalgia. 


Billboard poster painted by Neo Chon 

Teck at the Singapore Pavilion for Ming 

Wong’s Life of Imitation 

Together with Ming’s video works, which employ a versatile cast of multi-ethnic actors, 

this sense of nostalgia, coupled with the use of clichés and melodrama as an inverse device, 

also conveys undercurrents of historical and cultural repression. Ming’s appropriation 

of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life, for instance, uncovers the slippery layers of 

racial, sexual and gender constructs, where Sarah Jane, played here by two different male 

leads in drag, is forced to negotiate her ‘blackness’ while simultaneously pronouncing 

her ‘whiteness.’ Nevertheless, a consideration of Imitation of Life should not be a mere 

regurgitation of post-colonial articulations pertaining solely to dislocated identities, ‘third 

spaces’ and localisms. These concerns are as intrinsic as they are important, but it is by 

extension productive to reflect on how the margins of discourse on historical memory, 

the ‘of’ and ‘from’ a nation, together with the aesthetic forms which emerge as an expression 

of such, will continue to surface and evolve variously in form, address and content. 

Entrenchment in the self-same identity complex, a process of infinite mirroring which 

can be a trapping in itself, is otherwise the risk. 

Rather than explicitly underscoring anxieties of ‘foreignness,’ Pak Sheung Chuen’s 

Making (Perfect) World at the Hong Kong Pavilion takes a refreshing approach anchored 

on the notion of ‘place’ as an aesthetic gesture, (dis)placement and adaptation as conceptual 

processes. Showcasing a collection of 

photographs, video works, objects and small 

installations which document the subtle interactions 

undertaken by Pak in locations ranging 

from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Tokyo, Korea 

and back to Venice, the artist has mapped a 

psycho-geography of, and beyond Hong Kong 

as a harbor and city. Amongst the works, Pak 

re-imagines the measurement and notion of 

‘one’ sea from out of a public library in New 

York, linking up every book featuring coastal 

horizons from cover to cover, to form a shape 

of a sea. Waiting for Everyone to Fall Asleep 

presents a quiet serenade to the residents of a 

building in Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po, their 

activities reflected only through their window 

lights. The poetics of Pak’s personal and selfreflexive 

gestures in every instance serve as 

meditations on the unobserved, pointing also to 

the elasticity of borders and states of cognition. 

Modernity in Asia, a complex and perpetually 

transitional trajectory of local and global environments, 

competing and coalescing cultural 

forms, is thus contemplated with an open, rather 

than reductive end. The artist here functions not 

as a disengaged observer, but as an itinerant 

participant seeking to negotiate connections 

between contradicting elements inherent in day 

to day life, its micro-politics indirectly creating an outlet for reflection of national and 

transnational identities. 

Works by familiar names, Fang Lijun, Zeng Fanzhi and Qiu Zhijie amongst seven 

other artists, including the Liu Ding artist group, did not generate much hype at the 

China Pavilion, a stark contrast from the nation’s first participation in 2005, when Cai 

Guo Qiang bagged the Golden Lion award. Where addressing commerce and a utopian 

future has been taken up by the Chinese yet again, the Russian Pavilion’s Victory Over the 

Future recalls the 1913 Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun by Alexei Kruchonykh, its 

set designed at the time by Kazimir Malevich. A re-examination of the existing tensions 

between legacies of the Russian avant-garde, individual and societal behaviors as well 

as fears of economic or environmental catastrophe beyond the 21st century makes for an 


Installation view from the Danish 

Pavilion at the Danish & Nordic 

Pavilions, Giardini. Photo credits: 

Eliza Tan 

Bruce Nauman’s Fifteen Pairs of Hands 

(1996) at the American Pavilion in the 

Giardini. Photo credits: Eliza Tan 

ambitious showcase of works. Elsewhere, 

Shaun Gladwell’s MADDESTMAXIMVS: 

Planet & Stars Sequence at the Australian 

Pavilion resonates with an incisive 

sense of presentness, noteworthy for 

his ingenuous transpositions of painting 

and sculpture onto video, addressing the 

expansive possibilities of medium and 

material. 

The Danish and Nordic Pavilion’s 

creatively curated, post-utopian presentation 

by Elmgreen and Dragset, The 

Collectors, has gained near unanimous 

popularity. Staged as a piece of real estate 

put up for auction further to the ‘Death 

of a Collector,’ The Collectors presents 

a cool critique of “living in a magazine;” 

the epitomized, modernist ambition 

projected upon contemporary life but 

which unravels from within—makes for 

its immediacy. The ‘collector’s’ suicide 

is evidenced by a body afloat in a pool 

before the house. In the Nordic Pavilion, a live male nude lounges on an Arne Jacobson 

OX chair and a pair of boys sit listening to music together amidst works celebrating a 

homo-erotic aesthetic but which also simultaneously question stereotyped images of gay 

men. In the Danish Pavilion, the neighbouring wing of the collector’s mansion, objects 

including Fredrik Sjöberg’s Fly Collection and Massimo De Carlo’s Porcelain Collection 

reveal a portrait of their absent owner. A contemporary rendition on the various identities 

of ‘the collector’, the presentation follows in the vein of Walter Benjamin’s portrait of 

the collector as bourgeois, fetishistic, a historical materialist in the literal sense, and an 

allegorist all at once. 

Other highlights of the Biennale include 

Steve McQueen’s video installation 

for the British Pavilion, a ghostly and melancholic 

evocation of the Giardini desolate 

in winter, at a time when it could be said to 

be at its rawest and most beautiful, uninhabited 

by the biennale spectacle. McQueen’s 

presentation received a great many more 

thumbs up from British audiences in Venice 

this year, as compared previously to Tracey 

Emin. Since there was a capacity limit and 

particular screening times at the pavilion, 

the main disappointment for many during 

the opening days, was being turned away 

after queuing for hours for a ticket. Topological 

Gardens, Bruce Nauman’s showcase 

at the American Pavilion celebrates 

an encore of his contributions to art history, 

including groundbreaking works from the 

60s such as From Hand to Mouth, The True 

Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic 

Truths (1967), and videos from the 90s. 

Days (2009), Nauman’s sound installation 

for the biennale, comprises an aisle flanked 

by white sound boards from which emanate 


voices pronouncing the days of the week in English and Italian, echoing the conceptual 

thread running through the spectrum of his work from past to present. 

What Else Can We Talk About, Teresa Margolle’s piece at the Mexican Pavilion 

proved to be one of the most talked about works. Addressing a history of crime and 

violence, Pavilion attendants are seen mopping the floors of the Pavilion with a mixture 

of water and the blood of murder victims. Given Margolle’s reputation for using bodily 

parts and fluids in her art, one is still left wondering how blood might have been in 

reality obtained and exported for this heavy work. The piece nonetheless invokes the 

traces of violence, death’s invisibility and the burden of social responsibility through the 

simple gesture of mopping, here transformed into a powerful political metaphor for the 

simultaneous erasure and ‘staining’ of identities. 

In the aftermath of the manic opening days of the Biennale, it is perhaps only on 

hindsight that one can better appreciate the critical resonances of this year’s fare and the 

varying forms of worlds present, past and future which the works seek to express. Yet, 

I am not entirely certain that any of the works in the Biennale really set out to ‘make a 

world’ at all but rather, to hold a globe up to the light and turning that sphere under the 

light, to scrutinize the world for what it appears to be now in order to understand its present 

nature. At the Czech Pavilion, Roman Ondák’s Loop unassumingly questions what we 

currently perceive in our immediate present and the tendency to borrow from, rather than 

to invest in a future. Collapsing notions of the present with that of the future, the pavilion 

replicates its external ecology—the surrounding trees, plants and foliage surrounding the 

Giardini have been planted inside the pavilion. One might almost walk right through, 

and past it in a rush to look for what else is on show without noticing the work. That is, 

until you stop, take in a breath of fresh air and realize that this is the art, the world as it 

has already been made and its current composition, and how it continues to exist as far 

as it is re-envisioned according to how we relate to it from the here and now. 

Roman Ondák’s Loop (2009) at the 

Czech Pavilion in the Giardini. 

Photo credits: Eliza Tan 


patrick d. flores 

Object Lessons from Gwangju 

It was late December in 2007 when I got an email from Okwui Enwezor inviting me to be 

part of a section of the 7th Gwangju Biennale he was directing with two curators in the 

year that was to commence. I knew of Okwui through his work in criticism, theory, and 

exhibition making, and I found his disposition toward curation uniquely sharp, responsive, 

and venturesome. The opportunity to work with him was an important moment in my 

own efforts in the field, and to renew ties with one of the curators, the Indian poet and 

critic Ranjit Hoskote, with whom I had worked in the past in exhibitions, conferences, 

and publications, was something not to be missed. 

The invitation also came at a time when friend and colleague Joselina Cruz was 

appointed as one of the curators of the 2nd Singapore Biennale, which was to open days 

away from Gwangju in 2008. Yeyey, as the local art world calls her, is the first Philippine 

curator to be part of a curatorium of an exhibition of the biennale mode. I thought that 

these appointments were carving out vital space for curators in the country: here, they 

could practice within a wider ambit and in conversation with denser layers of curatorial 

and artistic issues. 

Also, the Gwangju episode allowed me to pursue other trajectories of curation. 

I had previous experience with slightly different structures of international curation. For 

the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia in 1999, I was a co-curator for 

the Philippines with the Australian artist and critic Pat Hoffie. In the same year, I was 

the curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the First Melbourne Biennale. And from 2000 to 

2003, I worked with eight curators from seven Asian countries for the Under Construction: 

New Dimensions in Asian Art project under the auspices of the Japan Foundation. 

In these forays, the focus was either representation of an art world or exploration of 

energy of contemporary art. But for Gwangju, I had more latitude to link up my research 

in curation in Southeast Asia, my theoretical reflections on contemporary art, and the 

actual practice of curation within a biennale context under the directorship of a wellknown 

curator from Nigeria based in the United States. Clearly, there was a discernible 

post-colonial critique in this sortie, but one that would be inflected with a reconsideration 

of radical political strategy or democratic discourse evoked by the site itself, Gwangju, 

in which an uprising in May 1980 helped topple a tenacious dictatorship and sparked 

the minjung movement. The specter of the minjung would be raised by Okwui as a foil 

to the privileged totem of rupture in Europe, the May 1968 student protest and strike in 

France. These historical coordinates are salient in trying to understand the foundations 

of contemporary art or any other critical modernities that partly arose from resistance 

to authority, norm, establishment, and master narrative. That Okwui was insistent on 

this thoroughgoing theoretical discussion (workshops, seminars, and a thick catalogue) 

invested the biennale with a robust theoretical framework, a commitment that was quite 

absent in the other eight biennales that opened in the same season of the year in Asia. 

This was an unprecedented ascendancy of exhibition making in the region, prompting 

some observers to herald an Asian century. 

The section for which I was asked to contribute was called Position Papers, 

which was a series of five small-scale curatorial projects initiated by five curators with 

divergent persuasions, from the enigmatic to the carnivalesque. We were given a free hand 

to propose anything; and this liberty was key to conceiving unpredictable, uneven, and 

idiosyncratic platforms. The section was meant to create another level to the biennale, 

which consisted of an anthology of the previous year’s exhibitions and commissions for 

specific sites in Gwangju. Our section had a more vertical orientation as it tried to probe 

certain impulses in contemporary art without regard for the new and the now. 

I proposed Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator, a discussion of the practice of four 

germinal figures in Southeast Asia who started out as artists of an avant garde inclination 

and then became pioneering independent curators in their respective art worlds: Jim 

Supangkat of Indonesia, Apinan Poshyananda of Thailand, Redza Piyadasa of Malaysia, 


and Raymundo Albano of the Philippines. This exhibition of art works, texts, and documentation 

of curatorial initiations surfaced a range of problematics: the role of the hybrid 

personage like the artist-curator; the transformation of the trope of curator in makeshift 

modernities, and the intimation of a discourse of the avant-garde in Southeast Asia. 

Okwui titled the biennale Annual Report. It was not framed by any theme. In fact, 

he would say that there is in the present a crisis in thematic exhibitions: the biennale 

could be an occasion for a pause or an introspection as well as a retrospection. I think my 

proposal fit into this scheme, because it was in the same vein a way of looking back at the 

seventies in Southeast Asia, the Cold War, the formation of civil society and democracy, 

and the heady times of the nineties when exhibitions in Asia and the Pacific began to 

draft their own cartographies. According to Okwui, 

These exhibitions, proposals, processions, and activities can be understood 

as a chain of traveling cultural worlds and idioms; a network of incommensurable 

experiments in global culture within the contemporary calendar. 

Whether originating from a shopping mall, a folk theater, a makeshift display 

in neigh borhood, alternative gallery systems, non-profit institutions, local 

cultural centers, or the commercial gallery circuit, art fairs, museums, 

festivals, and a wide array of exhibition systems and spaces, the biennale’s 

goals is to illuminate the adventure-time and everyday localities of contempo 

rary artistic practice…In presenting these exhibitions, proposals, and projects, 

the biennale does not aim for one singular dominant vision, nor will it assume 

any sense of grandiose authorship. But by linking together the work of many 

curators, artists, institutions, and galleries, the objective is to achieve within 

the biennale a forum of collective authorship. 

Ray Albano. Step on the Sand and 

Make Footprints. (a reconstruction). 

Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator 

exhibition, 7th Gwangju Biennale, 2008. 

Photo courtesy of Gwangju Biennale 

It was propitious that Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator was presented beside the 

Whitney Museum retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark, another eccentric artist who 

intuited everyday life in Manhattan through architectural interventions. With this tangent, 

the whole notion of conceptualism across art worlds gained new depth, and not because 

of a provincial articulation from Southeast Asia, a vernacular variation, as it were, but 

because of an equivalent locution from an alternative vantage. 


Joselina cruz 

Signs of Wonder 

How can I not ask this: isn’t good laughter born from the 

“wonder of the event?”That is to say, the event where something is becoming 

and which offers us the experience of, as Michael Serres would say, “the immense, 

sparkling, holy joy of having to think.” (Lomax, 2000, pxii) 

When I was asked to work on the second Singapore Biennale, all the missteps that I had 

seen and critiqued regarding the first, as well as the criticisms that surrounded biennales 

which I had shored up all these years came rushing to the fore. All the criticisms, especially 

that of the biennale being staged together with the International Monetary Fund 

meeting, were problems I was determined to resist and desist. The rate of my success in 

resistance was dismal. 

The circumstances of the curatorial team’s coming together was a highly balanced 

decision, with Fumio Nanjo’s continuation as artistic director, being an especially important 

key at giving the biennale the necessary steam to forge into the second. Nanjo-san 

was the epitome of the regional internationalist, with as many biennales tucked under 

his belt as the number of biennales that ran for that year throughout the region. Matthew 

Ngui was deeply respected by the Singaporean art community as both artist and curator, 

having been part of important international exhibitions (Documenta and Cities on the 

Move to name a few); these made him perfect for the post. Finally, I had some curatorial 

experience, I was also familiar with Southeast Asia as my specialisation and interest, and 

more importantly, I had previously worked in Singapore. 

With the Singapore Biennale 2008 (SB2008), I found myself with the opportunity 

to work on a new scale, and with more demanding parameters that had to be thought 

through more critically and more reflexively. Despite the intense 18 months that we 

worked on for the Biennale, the space for reflection is still only, ever, after the fact. The 

months before the biennale where marked by a relentless pace that seemed to be at the 

heart of the process. I was coiled within a machine wherein days rolled into weeks and 

weeks churned out months quickly. It was an appalling luxury to find myself immersed 

and sucked into becoming a mere cog of biennale-making. Rupture is a difficult strategy. 

And often a strategy that backfires when set within an ossified system. The platform of 

a biennale is like that of a gelatinous substance. You see yourself and everyone else in 

place, but very few within can move except with labored motions. The biennale structure 

allows very few of its proponents the ability for true criticality without sacrificing the 

exhibitionary aspect of the enterprise. Despite Marian Pastor-Roces’s extolling Havana’s 

interesting position (which positioned itself as the Third World Biennale), Havana is 

still located within the confines of the biennale bind (“Crystal Palace Exhibitions” in 

Over Here, 2007). Biennales do not seem to have the ability to turn into itself and create 

self-reflexive exhibitions that continuously and successfully question the foundation on 

which it exists. 

Adding a layer to the difficulty of working within biennales is the fact that is Singapore. 

Singapore is a city with many troubling aspects underneath its shiny exterior, 

transparency being the least of its virtues. The structure of the city is framed strongly by 

its government, to quote: 

Singapore has constructed a veneer of democracy, development and 

freedom that largely insulate it from international criticism. While Singapore 

is a parliamentary democracy in name, the effectiveness of its democracy is 

undermined by the PAP’s rigorous controls over speech and the press. 

It is perhaps because of their economic prosperity that the people of 

Singapore do not protest more at their exclusion from the political process. 

From a human rights stand point, however, the Western-style prosperity of the 

place makes denials of civil and political rights all the more offensive. 1 


Endnote 

1. http://www.singapore-window. 

org/sw02/020530hr.htm 

While such facts may be fodder for Human Rights activists, it makes for a very 

difficult position for criticality in art to subsist. So much so that other ideas have to be 

put into play for the site of the biennale to be activated. Fumio Nanjo’s two-edition 

thematic are, on the surface, seemingly benign conceptual plays on ideas. While I have 

misgivings regarding the trajectory of Belief, as it tends to be concretized on sites of 

religion and politics, which then become the narrow sites wherein they are critiqued, 

Wonder however is an idea that sits itself within an abstract plane. One could argue that 

it could have been under any other guise, wonder however sits in both the intellect and 

the emotion and moves it. And its choice was made to introduce the lengths as which 

imagination could be stretched through the visual sphere. 

Imagination is what the Singapore has been deprived of, as imagination enables 

individuals to think beyond the possibilities what was presented them. Thus to allow 

intellect to happen upon imagination opens possibilities including that of the seemingly 

impossible. The Biennale sought to bring a variety of art works which challenged this 

mindset and spur alternative thinking. Singapore is a peculiarly un-curious city. However, 

to pique an individual’s interest is a singular experience. I have always held on to the 

Plato’s adage that “philosophy begins with wonder.” Wonder asks questions. It deepens 

curiosity and allows the intellect to function and reach across actions which may have 

previously un-nerved us. I always saw the exhibition as more for the Singaporeans first, 

rather than the international audience. The most quiet and sublime of works may in the 

end be the most effective and influential, more than shock. Sometimes shock does not 

leave a lasting impression, whereas wonder or that of curiosity begets a more sublime 

psychological insinuation. Recently, the triumph of civil action took place in Singapore. 

When a fundamentalist Christian sect managed to infiltrate a progressive women’s group 

called AWARE, vigilant members of society took to action. The civil action that took place 

to change the governance of the group to one more plural and inclusive was a feat in the 

history of Singapore’s civil liberties. There was enough critical mass gathered to lead to 

a change of leadership, but more importantly, those who participated (some 3000 people 

gathered in a state wherein five people need a permit to assemble) exemplified individual 

choices to become part of the discussion. While this may not be the effect of the exhibition, 

there is to my mind this connection of awe that this has happened. There are of course 

historical and social factors that galvanized and allowed for this event to occur, but are 

the subtle suggestions of mass action and insidious political action inherent in some of 

the work suggestive of possibilities? I would like to think that despite this most tenuous 

connecting thread, art somehow contributed to the Singaporean collective subconscious, 

no matter how miniscule. It was truly, to say the least, a wonder of an event. 

gerry coulter 

Lisa Yuskavage 

Lisa Yuskavage (47) is an American painter from Philadelphia who took her MFA at Yale 

in 1986. Since the early 1990s she has enjoyed increasing success in the art world: several 

solo shows in prestigious venues in recent years; her works reside in top collections 

(including MOMA, New York); and recently her paintings have topped the one million 

dollar mark at auction. 1 By any reasonable standard for “art world success” Yuskavage’s 

star shines bright. I think her work is a success which is very much deserved as much 

for the discussions it has generated as for what is skillfully enacts on its canvases (oil 

on linen). 

Like a number of the “old masters” she produces pictures at the rate of about five 

per year. Described as “technically ambitious (Lovelace, 2001),” her works brilliantly 

mock the male gaze (if it can get past the initial embarrassment) (see also Scott, 2006). 

Her oils are deeply thoughtful and very delicate paintings which have undergone meticulous 

preparation. Yuskavage scrupulously attempts to keep at bay the unintended 


and this lends to her work something I am less fond of—their calculated 

quality. She makes many drawings as well as three dimensional models. 

She is deeply concerned with light and distance for which she uses both 

live models and photographs before she begins to draw. 

This essay examines her art and how its thought provoking nature 

speaks so well to our time, and the way it raises provocative questions as: 

“If you had never seen her work before and I showed it to you saying it 

was painted by a man—would your response to it be different than if you 

looked at it knowing she were a woman?” What is said about the woman 

who paints (mainly) female nudes speaks volumes about the limitations 

(and possibilities) for women artists in our time. 

Lisa Yuskavage. Day (1994) 

Intersecting Interpretations 

Reading art critics concerned with Yuskavage’s reminds me that I live 

in a very conservative period when even the discourse of the art world is 

often limited by conventional approaches to women, sex, and the body. 

One critic has written, for example, that such pictures embarrass him when 

he meets them in the gallery (Saltz, 2006). 

I am even told by the Public Art Fund website that Yuskavage makes 

“extreme depictions of women”(Public Art Fund, 2007). But Yuskavage’s 

nudes are not really very radical at all for a place like New York. Images 

of nude or nearly nude women (usually made by men), surround me in art galleries, in 

magazine advertisements, in internet searches for everything from “flowers” to “tools,” 

pin-ups, and especially when I am in Europe, in street advertisements. However conservative 

the times may be we do live in a context which one leading theorist has described 

as “ambient pornography” (Baudrillard, 2005:25). This too is one of the ironies of our 

times. 

When we examine her technique and process Yuskavage emerges as a rather conservative 

painter. Like Odd Nerdrum she can be read as a very traditional as opposed to 

“contemporary” artist. She has told interviewers that she remained sheltered very much 

from contemporary art during her younger days and that she is infatuated with the European 

nude (Lovelace, 2001). In technical terms what I think we have in Yuskavage is 

a woman artist who refuses to leave the European oil painting tradition and its female 

nude behind just as she avoids escapism. When we take a second look at her work we 

find a very challenging artist who gives us much to think about concerning the women 

she paints. In these conservative times perhaps many people are reluctant to do this. 

It has been a hallmark of previous conservative times that images of naked bodies are 

sequestered away from public view for private consumption. It is to this second level of 

escapism where Yuskavage’s art does its violence and the critics who are embarrassed 

to be in its presence in public make us aware of this, despite themselves. 

One of Yuskavage’s detractors for a number of years has been New York Sun art 

critic David Cohen. Cohen says that Yuskavage fuses “the aesthetics of Hallmark cards 

and the knowing rhetoric of the graduate school seminar” (2003). Cohen cannot seem to 

get past the fact that Yuskavage is painting “breasts and buttocks” which for him remain 

“slick and silly” but to his credit, in my view, he does see something of Francis Bacon 

in her work. After suggesting who she may have slept with (do we still do that in art 

criticism concerning women or men?), Cohen then castigates Yuskavage’s technique 

which he says is “derived from mid-twentieth century ‘How To’ manuals” and is “full of 

hackneyed short cuts and splashy effects” (2003). Cohen also worries about the number 

of “fat women” in her paintings [some of Yuskavage’s women are pregnant] but he does 

think that she is coming to tone down her “misogyny”. What would women do without 

such men as Cohen to protect them? As for the Hallmark quip I really doubt Yuskavage 

will be asked to design a Christmas set for them any time soon! 

Also among the early responses to her works was the thought that one might hang 

in the mansion of Playboy empire founder Hugh Hefner, due in large part to the position 

of the figures, lighting and color tonalities. Others have noted that her paintings remind 


Yuskavage. True Blonde, Draped (1999) 

them of soft pornography but in way that nudes by Ingres do not. But when we look 

closer at images such as Day and True Blonde, Draped, we see that these are not the 

airbrushed and digitally collaged women of Playboy, other soft pornography magazines, 

or the advertising industry. Yuskavage’s women look far more like actual women—imperfect 

breasts, hips and thighs that are neither exactly the same nor perfectly smooth. 

Far from the hyper-idealized Playboy nude, the woman in Day is not revealing herself as 

in some pin-up pose; she is doing one of the things our culture teaches women to do—to 

examine themselves for imperfections. Yuskavage has supplied this image with several 

imperfections as we see when we look at it longer. It isn’t long before those thoughts of 

soft porn or a pin-up dissipate. 

In various interviews and statements concerning her work Yuskavage has acknowledged 

Bernini and other masters of painting the figure as her inspirations. Responding to 

an interviewer who asked her about Bernini’s influence Yuskavage replied: “I am really 

interested in the way things are weighted at the bottom. Bernini puts a helmet and rocks at 

the base to keep the work balanced. The difference is that, in a painting, you can take the 

weight out of the bottom and put it at the top. The ‘weight’ of color is another way of talking 

about color value, so when you use close value, as I do in these paintings, you reduce 

the weight of color.” Yuskavage blends classical ideas with contemporary representations 

as well. In four of her earlier works she modeled them after soft porn images found in 

Penthouse magazine (the principle competitor of Playboy) (see Enright, 2007). 

We also notice that the sitter in True Blonde, Draped, while positioned in a boudoir 

pose typical of the magazines, certainly isn’t forcing a happy smile for the viewer. 

Yuskavage says she does not paint beauty but “the failure of beauty” (in Enright, 2007). 

It is quite possible that this painting represents a victim of a recent sexual attack (or at 

least someone living in a coercive sexualized arrangement). Her expression is one that 

makes us think long and hard about just what it is that she is thinking. I suppose there 

are some people who could be turned on by just about anything but I do not think it is 

imprudent to say that this painting does not work like pornography is supposed to work. 

I think a number of Yuskavage’s more vehement critics are simply quite uncomfortable 

with the female nude. Yuskavage engages with this problem well and her work really 

doesn’t seem to be about sex. The more we linger among her works the less “sexy” they 

become. 

Indeed, in the case of True Blonde, Draped, the shadow falling over the right side 

of her face serves as an abstract element performing the role that abstract swirls of color 

played in the painting of Francis Bacon. Like Bacon, Yuskavage uses this unclear element 

to posit that we can never fully know the mind of a sitter or any other 

person fully. Bacon said this was the case even when the work is a self 

portrait (Coulter, 2007). In an earlier painting, Big Blonde (1997), Yuskavage 

paints a very Bacon-like abstract swirl (of hair) sweeping down across 

the woman’s face. This makes the woman more enigmatic and highlights 

an underlying menacing quality to the world inhabited by the women in 

Yuskavage’s art. Many of her women look as exhausted as any Degas ballerina 

or the fatigued women who occupy Lautrec’s paintings (see also 

Lovelace, 2001). The color tonalities (the Romantic and Rococo sunsets of 

Etty and Fragonard come to mind), contribute to the sense of strangeness 

and mystery in her work. If you find the women in her paintings disturbing 

—as even some well established critics have—perhaps it is important to ask 

the same questions about the culture from which the painter, and presumably 

her subjects, come from. Color is the vehicle of an invitation to stop 

and look closely and deeply. There are many things to find disturbing about 

our society today from any woman’s point of view (and there is nothing for 

shock value in a Yuskavage show that will not pale in comparison to the 

pages of many magazines at the local grocery store). 

So let us do that—let’s look again at True Blonde, Draped—look 

again at that face and body—is she 17 or 57? Is this an image of a woman 


Yuskavage. True Blonde (1999). 

Yuskavage. Imprint (2006) 

at different ages shown to us simultaneously? Perhaps this is why Yuskavage has begun 

painting two figures in some of her recent works such as Imprint (2006). As Yuskavage 

suggested to an interviewer: “I would put out the possibility that there are not two figures. 

That there is one figure, one entity. It’s the idea of caring for oneself or struggling 

with oneself” (Scott, 2006). Imprint is my favorite Yuskavage painting—so poetic in its 

representation of the two ages of a woman—the forty-something clinging to her youth 

which looks ambivalently on the older woman she is to become. 

The woman in True Blonde may appear, at first glance to be masturbating, but on 

second glance, she also appears rather introspective and her almost stereotypical (but as 

always in a Yuskavage), imperfect body is more like that of Day. Perhaps she is a magazine 

model—but one saddened by her occupation pondering other possibilities. Further, 

in most pornographic imagery she would appear in stockings and the black shadow line 

falling over her left thigh may indeed be Yuskavage’s way of entreating us to think about 

that. This might be a woman protecting her sexuality from the viewer, keeping one of her 

powers and her pleasures to herself. If this were an image in a pornographic magazine 

then it is quite likely that the woman’s sexual organs would be exposed and a much more 

explicit image of masturbation would be shown. In those images the woman typically 

looks into the camera with her air brushed misty eyes. 

There is also the title “True Blonde” which plays upon the old witticism that the 

only way to know the true colour of a woman’s hair is to see her pubic area. In this case, 

we are prevented from seeing this area by the sitter herself. For all we know this may be 

an image of a woman coming to contemplate her own powers, desires, fantasies. Maybe 

Yuskavage’s art is about the women—not the viewer! 

It seems that whatever her motivations and intentions, Lisa Yuskavage has managed 

to be understood as a sexist and a feminist at the same time, although the painter 

does not seem to identify her art with feminism: “There’s nothing more real than politics, 

and my work is not about what’s real,” she says (Scott, 2006). Eschewing politics for 

fiction, her work is likely to offend the orthodox feminist as it is the stereotypical “old 

white male conservative.” This, to my mind, is among the best things about Yuskavage’s 

work. Like many artists (be they writers, painters, photographers etc.), Yuskavage does 

not seek an empirical or a political resolution to the world in her art—but rather—a 

poetic one. Inviting multiple and complex readings, Yuskavage cultivates, intentionally 

or otherwise, uncertainty. The kind of pleasant uncertainty that stimulates debate and 

engagement with art. As Jean Baudrillard would understand the world is given to us as 

enigmatic and unintelligible—why cannot the task of thought (including poetry, fiction, 

painting) be to make the world even more enigmatic, more unintelligible? (2000:83; see 

also 1996:105; and 2001:155) 

Conclusion 

Perhaps in our Patriot Act, post-September 11, 2001 world, the critics 

(especially those located in New York), prefer their art on the lighter side. I 

have a feeling that if a pre-Raphaelite were to emerge in New York s/he would 

be highly celebrated at this time. Painters react to the times in which they live. 

Yuskavage has her way, the escapists have theirs. Robert Rauschenberg worried 

that every new thing he learned about art placed a certain limit on him. This is 

true of everything we learn no matter how useful or valuable it may be. Much 

of the negative critical response to Lisa Yuskavage’s art reminds me of another 

woman artist—Jenny Holtzer and one of her “Truisms”: “you are a victim of 

the rules you live by.” 

One critic recently said (not supportively) that Yuskavage was a good example 

of the Andy Warhol quip: “Art is what you can get away with” (Naves, 

2003). The same may also be said about art criticism. In any event Yuskavage 

does not seem to be paying much attention to the critics and in her interview with 

Enright she also cited Warhol when asked how she felt about the critics. She said 

she hoped they spelled her name correctly and otherwise does not worry about 

what the critics are saying—simply measure it in press column inches (Enright, 

2007). 


Endnotes 

1. The work, which sold for $1,024,000 

at Sotheby’s (New York) on May 10, 

2006 is known as Honeymoon (1988). 

A list of Yuskavage’s solo and group 

shows as well as awards she has received 

may be viewed in her CV as posted by 

The David Zwirner Gallery: http://www. 

davidzwirner.com/resources/37715/ 

LY%20Bio%202007.pdf 

2. All the four images included in this 

essay are available on many websites 

as a result of a search on “Google 

Images” including the website of 

Lisa Yuskavage’s dealer, David 

Zwirner. http://www.davidzwirner.com/ 

What an interesting thing it is to see the female nude in art history so deeply problematized 

by critics at the time when a highly skilled woman has emerged to paint them. 

Women have been far more likely to use performance, installation art, and photography 

to achieve what Yuskavage does in the historically contentious medium of oil paint. One 

thinks of Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith and Tina Barney who were also roundly dismissed 

in their early days (see Lovelace, 2001). Few women painters have worked with 

the nude as Yuskavage has done (Tamara Lempicka, Frida Kahlo, Dorothy Tanning, and 

Silvia Sleigh). There are also very few women painters who have broached this area of 

traditional male desire in a way that allows them the power to reflect on the female nude 

from either her point of view or that of the women in the paintings. Her works compel me 

to ask: “what if the painter is actually asking me to think about what it means to look at 

women’s bodies as a public viewer in a public space—rather than alone with a magazine 

or a computer screen at home?” Yuskavage suggested in a recent interview with Robert 

Enright that this is at least part of what she is doing with her work: “consider that what 

we’re looking at is the exact opposite of what we think we’re seeing. We are looking in 

on something that is purely intimate, rather than at something occasioned by the presence 

of the viewer?” (in Enright, 2007). Issues of sexuality, reception and power are difficult 

to skirt when looking at Yuskavage’s works, and perhaps that is another reason why her 

work is so unsettling to some. 

References 

Jean Baudrillard (1996). The Perfect Crime. New York: Verso. 

Jean Baudrillard (2000). The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Jean Baudrillard (2001). Impossible Exchange. London: SAGE. 

Jean Baudrillard (2005). The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. Edited by 

Sylvere Lotringer. NewYork: Semiotext(e)/ MIT Press. 

David Cohen (2003). “Gallery Going: Lisa Yuskavage” New York Sun (June 19): http://www. 

artcritical.com/DavidCohen/SUN6.htm 

Gerry Coulter (2007). “Overcoming the Epistemological Break: Francis Bacon and Jean 

Baudrillard and the Intersections of Art and Theory” Euro Art Magazine, Number 5, (Winter): 

http://www.euroartmagazine.com/new/?issue=6&page=1&content=140 

Gerry Coulter (2007a). “One Among Several – The Traditional Gaze Seduced. In Kritikos: 

A Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text, and Image (July, 2007): http://intertheory. 

org/coulter2.htm 

Robert Enright (2007). “The Overwhelmer: An Interview with Lisa Yuskavage.” Border Crossings 

Magazine (May): http://bordercrossingsmag.com/issue103/article/15 

Carey Lovelace (2001). “Lisa Yuskavage: Fleshed Out.” In Art in America (July): http://www. 

findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_7_89/ai_76332997 

Mario Naves (2003). “Hurry Up, Please, It’s Time: Banishing Fame’s 16th Minute”. The New 

York Observer, (June 8): http://www.observer.com/node/47648 

Public Art Fund (2007). “Public Art Fund Talks: Current Schedule: Lisa Yuskavage” (May 3): 

http://www.publicartfund.org/pafweb/talks/talks-s07.htm 

Jerry Saltz (2006). “Female Trouble” Lisa Yuskavage – New Work” Village Voice, (November 

20): http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz11-20-06.asp 

Andrea K. Scott (2006). “Lisa Yuskavage: Flesh for Fantasy.” An interview in Time Out New 

York, Number 577 (October 19-25, 2006). This is also on web: http://www.timeout.com/ 

newyork/articles/art/3954/flesh-for-fantasy 


kubilay akman 

Flashing Emin: Critical Analysis of 

“Spectacular” Contemporary Arts 

First Words 

The conceptual gravity of “conceptual arts” is becoming much weaker every 

day as the artists involved in contemporary art movements are increasingly trapped by 

narcissistic tendencies and an extremely pronounced intrigue with domestic objects. 

Some examples are turning into a “big joke” without causing a big laugh. Where is art 

going? Or, perhaps a better question, where has art been? The answer is still ambiguous 

and many of the attempts to answer this question most probably would be swept aside 

by the actual happenings in the art world. In this article, my intention is quite far away 

from providing “substantial answers” to the issues and problems of the contemporary 

art world; however, this text is intended to contribute to the current theoretical and conceptual 

problems of art in the 2000s through some modest questions, with a particular 

focus on the art works of Tracey Emin. This was not a random gesture to emphasize “art 

works” with italics. Whether to call her and other contemporary artists’ works “art” or 

not has been a crucial separation for the last decade. On the one hand, there is a chorus 

of art critics, writers, publishers, editors, curators, collectors, etc. chanting and greeting 

these works as outstanding masterpieces, without any critical process. On the other 

hand we find the most conventional and conservative critics blaming these contemporary 

tendencies with a preference for previous art styles and schools, and denying their being 

art in fact. I personally prefer to say: “Nice to meet you Achilles. I have no suspicion 

that you are Achilles. However, I am as sure as your name that you have that vulnerable 

heel. Although it is quite difficult to catch you there, still I will try to direct my arrows 

right there!” Yes, this is art. At least for the beginning we should accept that the works of 

Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and the others; are art. Actually works of all the significant 

conceptual artists aroused after the “aesthetical breaking point” of Marcel Duchamp 

could be considered as art. Here I will not get into a discussion around “What is art?”. 

However I can clarify a little further my theoretical position in this issue: 

1. Being or not being art cannot be determined by any collector, art dealer or by 

any art critic or scholar. 

2. Art as a social process and a social production from the caves to the galleries of 

modern cities. 

3. The current contemporary art is art in spite of all the reactionary critiques. Not 

because it is called art by spellbound followers, but it is art if only on account of the 

social, cultural and artistic structures that produce, reproduce and make it as art in a 

dynamic process. 

What is the point in her scandalous art works? Essentially, her point, like many 

other contemporary artists, is based on her “flashing” objects of her personal life and 

happenings. This kind of “exhibitionism” aesthetically created and performed, is still a 

premium seductive factor for the art audience. Especially when there are the fading shades 

of “innocence,” in the artistic expression, creation and production of art pieces, in spite 

of the dense coquettish style of the artist, the enthusiasm of the audience is growing. As 

Jean Baudrillard said, “There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.” Tracey Emin makes this 

balance perfectly, and through her all exhibitionism in the artistic activities, she keeps 

a semblance of internal innocence intact somewhere, and this is always catching the attention 

of the art crowd. Hence, I would claim that the “innocent” stratagem is the real 

factor of attention, rather than all the flashing ceremonies. 


In her career, she produced two symptomatic art works and she owes much of her 

success to these pieces. One is Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), or The 

Tent. It was owned by Charles Saatchi and burned in the Momart warehouse fire (2004). 

In this work Emin put the names of everybody she had slept with. She says, “Some I’d 

had shag with in bed or against a wall some I had just slept with, like my grandma. I used 

to lie in her bed and hold her hand. We used to listen to the radio together and nod off to 

sleep. You don’t do that with someone you don’t love and don’t care about.” 2 Here, you 

can see the addition of “innocence” too, if you can catch and “be caught.” This is the 

trick of Emin: always putting a little innocent sauce over the soup of lustfulness. This 

contrast is at the very core where “seduction” is bred. 

The other symptomatic work is, My Bed, which was exhibited in Tate Gallery 

(1999). In this work, she turned her used and dirty bed into an installation, with used 

towels, cigarette packs, vodka bottles, condoms, panties with menstrual stains, slippers 

and other objects from everyday life. Although the previous work was more scandalous, 

this is much more striking with its high level of exhibitionism and emotional exploitation. 

Simon Wilson, the curator from the Tate said: “It came about after an episode when she 

was very ill and depressed. She spent a week in bed in a suicidal state, according to her. 

It is a meditation on spending a lot of time in bed. The bed is confrontational. There is an 

underlying innocence and honesty in her work and you are reminded of very fundamental 

issues.” 3 Here, our thesis about “innocence” is officially accepted. We can just emphasize 

the artificiality of this innocence, which is professionally produced and being marketed. 

as or instance, the crises of a middle-aged woman, the theme of suicide, of being left like 

used condoms, etc. For me it appears a little soapy and not artistically well-organized, 

although the giants of art world would not agree with us. 

Contemporary Artists, or to be more exact, the most famous ones who have been 

involved in art capitalism more than the others, are a part of the “spectacle.” According 

Guy Debord, “the spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic 

expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss” 4 This is like a new 

form of alienation and the spectacle is trapping human beings. In the spectacle, “what 

was represented as genuine life reveals itself simply as more genuinely spectacular 5 life.” 

So, the effects exhibited in the work of Tracey Emin are just elements of a “spectacular 

life.” This spectacular existence of her art is harming the innocence and revealing the 

tricks of the seduction. Fortunately or unfortunately, we (the audience) are not the biggest 

victims of the spectacle in the contemporary art scene. The real victims are always 

the artists themselves: They are reaching popularity, fame, and fortune. So, you can ask 

how are they “victims”? If we look deeper, we see what was lost is very important and 

is compromised with all these things: in the wheels of spectacle, they are losing the possibility 

to express their potential more substantially and to be “free artists” whose art 

works are more lasting than TV advertisements or any other temporary thing in popular 

culture. If the risk of this loss is acceptable for them, this critique has no ontological 

basis for their understanding. 

For centuries, we have observed the indirect and sophisticated marks of artists’ 

individual lives. However, contemporary artists are rather impatient and directly put 

their lives into art form. The people you slept with, the condoms your partners used, 

the panties dirtied with your menstrual stains. Why should the audience be interested in 

theset? However, the audience is interested in these. This is another matter. I would like 

to focus on the narcissistic dimensions of this process. Emin confesses her narcissism 

in the words written on the tent, “With myself, always myself, never forgetting.” This is 

like a hymn of narcissism in my opinion, rather than the words of loneliness. 

Narcissus fell in love with himself and used to watch the reflection of his beauty in 

the water. In the contemporary/artistic version of narcissism the artist, broken up admiring 

and hating herself, is broadening her complicated feeling over the “self,” toward us. 

This is like dissolving in the water, rather than a simple reflection over it. In the classical/typical 

version of narcissistic order, the subject of admiration was located in the face 


of the person. In the modern version, everything the person or her personality touches is 

provided as “admiration subjects.” The subjects cover everything she touches, as if she 

consecrates whatever is around her. This is like a new personality, a kind of “hyper-personality.” 

The new narcissistic person is not satisfied by her own admiration and desiring 

to be admired by the millions. You see this same mechanism with all pop-stars. In this 

worship of narcissism the sacrifice is “art” on the altar of spectacle. 

Vulnerable Points 

There are several vulnerable points in Tracey Emin’s work. Maybe one of the most 

stigmatic one is that, in spite of all the everyday image, carelessness, randomness or 

openness, her works are treated in the same way, as more conventional art pieces. We 

have seen that two times: first, in the fire of warehouse; second, in the intervention of 

two Chinese artists. However there is a virtue, of which we find plenty of samples in 

other contemporary artists, although missing a little with Emin: temporary character of 

the work. Many contemporary artists are creating their works that destroy themselves or 

turn into something else with the participation of other people. However, if it were not 

burned in the fire, The Tent would remain the same forever. Maybe an artistic instinct 

prevented her to do it second time and in this way it has become more meaningful. When 

we look at to the case of Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, behind a humorous curtain we can 

realize a more sophisticated and political theme, which is like a divine punishment to 

the intentionally apolitical character of Emin’s art. After their “participation” the work 

(My Bed) was restored immediately, then nobody could say that: “this is a living art work 

and we consider this contribution as a new level of the concept.” Let us remember the 

motto: “With myself, always myself, never forgetting.” Apparently, a person who says 

this would not agree to collaborate with the others. 

What was the “contribution” or “intervention” of the Chinese artists to Tracey 

Emin’s Bed? Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi jumped over the My Bed in the Tate Gallery, in 

25 October 1999, this is the essence of their action, or with their own expression the art 

performance titled Two Naked Men Jump into Tracey’s Bed. The visitors were shocked 

during this action, and some of them even supposed that this is an official part of the 

event. The Chinese men intended to have some “critical sex” over the bed of Tracey Emin 

to complete the work, but they could not complete their performance entirely. Yuan Chai 

stated that Emin’s work was a strong one, although handicapped by being “institutionalized.” 

He said: “We want to push the idea further. Our action will make the public think 

about what is good art or bad art. We didn’t have time to do a proper performance. I 

thought I should touch the bed and smell the bed.” There were some words on his body 

such as “Communism,” “Freedom,” “Idealism,” and “Internationalism” written in Chinese 

and English. J. J. Xi said that Emin’s work was not interesting enough and they wanted 

to explore further, making it more significant and sensational. The words on his body 

were “Optimism,” “Idealism” and “Anarchism.” The gallery covered up this action and 

neither the gallery nor the artist made another attempt to charge the Chinese artists. 

So, there were two more names in Everyone T. Emin Slept With. Yuan Chai and 

Jian Jun Xi, not at the same time, but at the same bed, took their place with a serious 

intention to practice on/with her bed. So, why not include their names as well in a possible 

reincarnation of The Tent? Neither the gallery nor the artist was willing to accept 

this participation. The reason was intuitively expressed by Yuan Chai: institutionalization. 

The institutionalization process, despite the opposite image, has continued as a 

vulnerable point. In fact, it would be fairer to change the title of the work to Our Bed, as 

it belonged to the Chinese artists as well. However, the more the narcissistic character 

spread through, the stronger she would react to any other dissolution in the water of her 

self-centered artistic production. Hence, the gallery just restored the installation, ignoring 

the new contribution. 


Alexander Brener would call the action/performance of the Chinese artists probably 

as a kind of “anti-technological resistance.” According to Brener, anti-technologies are 

“striving for decomposition and unproductivity. Decomposition is an attempt to hinder 

the repressive order, which in hegemonic culture is perceived as the main source of 

productivity. The normative product in today’s understanding is repressive consensus 

in a certain packaging. Exactly this consensus must be subjected to the procedure of 

decomposition. Decomposition and disintegration are the weapons of a minority, calling 

into question the consensus of a moral majority.” 7 Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi used these 

“weapons” as a part of this minority against the repressive “consensus.” The “decomposition” 

disintegrated the “certain packaging” of the spectacular art for a while, although 

their voice just faded in the fog of amnesia. 

Notes: 

1. “Emin Defends Her Art,” BBC Online, 

BBC News (August 13, 2001). 

2. Barry Didcock, “The E spot,” The 

Sunday Herald, 30 April 2006 

3. Nigel Reynolds, “Tate warns that 

soiled bed exhibit may offend,” 

Telegraph, 20 October 1999 

4. Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle, 

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/ 

en/display/16 

5. Ibid, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/23 

6. Sam Wallace, “Tate protesters wreck 

artist’s unmade bed,” Telegraph, 25 

October 1999. 

7. Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz, 

“Anti Technologies of Resistance”, 

EuroArt Web Magazine, issue: 1, Winter 

2006 

8. Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual 

Art,” ArtForum, June 1967. 

9. The full quote from Johann Wolfgang 

von Goethe is like this: “Theory is gray, 

but the golden tree of life is green.” 

Last Words 

Unfortunately, Tracey Emin’s sensational style, both in her life and art works, is 

overshadowing the more interesting representatives of contemporary art scene and more 

particularly YBAs, such as Damien Hirst. As Sol Lewitt said, “the idea becomes a machine 

that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is 

intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless.” 8 When 

we look at numerous established or young contemporary artists, we see how the machine 

(idea) successfully works in the intuitive creation/production process. During my stay 

in the Balkans, as an art critic and scholar I had the chance to see the outstanding works 

of many artists, who are working devotedly despite all the difficulties. I can mention the 

names of Alem Korkut, Tanja Perisic, Saso Stanojkovic, Slavica Janeslieva among many 

others. Apparently Damien Hirst is more “conceptual” and “creative” than Tracey Emin 

with his elaborately thought and applied installations. I can mention also the names of 

Debora Warner and Ana Prvacki, both are promising female promising artists who prove 

that art can be successful and aesthetically/conceptually significant without flashing the 

artist himself/herself. And of course Marina Abramovic is the “master” of arts that touch 

the most intimate and individual points, while at the same time dealing with the most 

public and political issues, through a powerful artistic grammar, even exposing her body 

in the highest open and direct way, still thousands miles far away from exhibitionism. 

Tracey Emin is unfortunately lacking of these features. 

Here the borders of our critical analysis have been limited with just two installations, 

as these were the most typical and stigmatic ones. Flashing the “personal” is an 

obsession for Emin constantly repeated through her works. This shallow exhibitionism 

is missing a strong conceptual or artistic basis, and prodding the audience through the 

“flashes,”—spectacle, innocence games and lascivious tricks of seduction. Art does not 

need to be “theoretical,” as Lewitt said. However an “idea” is processed as the essential 

mechanism at the heart of conceptual arts. For Emin, “desire” is filling the absence of 

an elaborate idea. It is possible to talk about the “desiring machines” in the Deleuzian 

meaning of the term, crossing her work. 

If we close the circle where we started, when we speak sociologically, Emin is an 

artist and her work is art; although she has the Achilles’ Heel. The critique here targeted 

her “heel.” However the qualities that I refer to as “Achilles’ Heel” can be quite acceptable 

for others. We can have an endless theoretical discussion on this issue. As Goethe 

said, “theory is gray.” 9 The point is that the green tree of life is also becoming gray 

more and more everyday. And finally, when art is also beginning to lose its colors and 

becoming gray, then the bells of caution are ringing. There are dark gray clouds floating 

over contemporary arts. 


Please click on this link to download the complete document The Artist’s Reseved 

Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement: www.ctrlp-artjournal.org/pdfs/siegelaub.pdf 


patrick d. flores 

The Philippine Modern: 

Conceiving a Collective Category 

It was in 1981 when the artist Raymundo Albano, director of museums and non-theater 

operations at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), looked back at the ten years 

of what he called developmental art. There pervaded since 1971, the eve of the declaration 

of Martial Law by Ferdinand Marcos, to the beginning of the decade of the regime’s 

decline, a “crisis in representation” and, Albano quoting the critic Armando Manalo, a 

“metaphysical unrest.” 1 This was largely shaped by the search for a sense of origin of 

Philippine art that was reckoned to be lying beyond the pale of the “western tradition”: 

a daunting prospect for a quest considering that the very inquiry into this identity may 

just prove to be the immanent critique of colonialism itself and, therefore, could never 

be viewed as external or extraneous to the conception of whatever may be nominated 

as “Philippine.” Still, the anxiety festered, and in the frenzy of nation building in the 

sanguine season of the Cold War, this affliction could only be alluring, open to both 

pageantry and melodrama, overinvestment and underexplanation. After all, as high priest 

Arturo Luz would sternly disabuse: “There is yet no tradition in Filipino painting, only 

painters painting in a foreign manner or style or tradition.” 2 This desire for the Filipino 

is the fear of repeating the foreign, a fear that defers the perfection of the impossible, 

the “not-yet” possible, Filipino. 

Albano, perhaps in a strategically ludic mode, likened this form of artistic practice 

to other forms of developmentalist exercise, as in developmental communication 

harnessed for population control programs, or simply any other “fast-action” initiatives 

that could not be delayed, as in the building of roads or security complements yielding 

results “based on a total community response.” 3 The CCP thought of the period from 

1971 to 1975 as the “exposure phase” in which “advanced art—experimental in nature 

—were deployed in the galleries. The use of sand, junk iron, non-art materials such as raw 

lumber, rocks...were common materials for the artists’ development strategies. People 

were shocked, scared, delighted, pleased and satisfied even though their preconceived 

notions of art did not agree with what they encountered.” 4 This “curatorial stance” was 

provocative: it may have insinuated a level of democratic habit within a possible Kantian 

sensus communis, an engagement with strangeness and an encounter with disbelief, into 

an institution that was complicit in repressing the body politic in no uncertain terms. 

In all this, Albano was convinced that the atmosphere at the CCP “made one relatively 

aware of an environment suddenly turning visible.” 5 The Center, hence, was conceiving 

a world and its spellbound subjects, inventing an indispensable mythology of freedom 

and prefiguring the unknown in a regime that had claimed unerring destiny: tadhana, a 

fate written in the stars. 

This exhibition excerpts Albano’s foundational statement because it intimates an 

ontogenesis, a process of becoming, rendered urgent, with the alacrity of development, 

in the flash of exposure. This “suddenly turning visible” captures the energy of that instance 

and willful instantiation—and it may be a paradox that it presages a project that 

is about objects, a collection that has become sediment, the remains of erstwhile heady 

times. Nevertheless, these objects are in place: as they are brought out into the light of 

an exhibition marking a monolith’s birth forty years ago, they will be endowed with the 

coherence of a collection, regardless of how they have been convened incoherently over 

time. This enables the public to revisit this estate so to speak, and from it carve out a 

terrain on which to initiate speculations. 


Victorio Edades. The Builders. 

Image courtesy of the Cultural Center 

of the Philippines. 

Collecting History 

There is no existing history of the art collection. This commemorative exhibition 

seeks to reconstruct how objects made their way into the institution as an initial survey 

of sightlines. We can point to specific sources: 

First the building itself, which opened in 1969, that housed donations from such 

artists as Hernando R. Ocampo, who offered his design for the work Genesis that was 

transformed into a wondrous tapestry by Japanese weavers to serve as the iconic curtain 

of the Main Theater; Arturo Luz (Black and White) and Cesar Legaspi (Triptych) likewise 

donated murals, which adorn the Little Theater Lobby, alongside Eduardo Castrillo’s 

metal totem Pyramid Growth. Other works, most probably commissions as well, 

that were built into the structure include Vicente Manansala’s brass relief Tribute to the 

Seven Arts for the Main Theater entrance and Roberto Chabet’s collage for the curtain 

of the Little Theater. A panel of Carlos Francisco’s Abuses of Spanish Authorities for the 

New York World’s Fair in 1964; Napoleon Abueva’s Ballet Dancer; and Arturo Luz’s 

gargantuan paper clip were later additions to the public art collection of the Center. 6 By 

presidential fiat in 1966, the site of the building was decreed, and thereafter the Board of 

Trustees was named. The edifice, sitting on 21 hectares of reclaimed land from Manila 

Bay, is by itself part of the art collection in a manner of speaking. Designed by Leandro 

Locsin, it speaks of the style that was hailed then as innovative and its engineering, a 

public works feat for a Third World country in Southeast Asia: cantilevered construction 

in raw concrete with the use of crushed shells on site as aggregate and landscaping by 

Ildefonso P. Santos. 

The commitment of the architect to the visual arts was earnest as indicated in the 

blueprint: a painting and sculpture hall with a section on contemporary art; a colonial 

art pavilion, split into two levels in which the San Jose church baroque altar donated 

by Antonio Bantug was to be ensconced; the Arturo de Santos collection of art, gold, 

and ceramics; the Potenciano Badillo collection of Muslim art; and a library for art and 

music. These pavilions would be surrounded by gardens, fountains, pools, and plazas so 

that visitors may be “surprised at every turn as new vistas unfold.” 7 

Second, the initial acquisitions, largely undertaken by Roberto Chabet, who was 

appointed Curator as early as 1967, two years before the Center formally opened to the 

public. He purchased for the Center important pieces like Victorio Edades’s The Builders 

and Napoleon Abueva’s Allegorical Harpoon. 8 It could be that some of these early pieces 

were part of Summer Exhibition 1970, 

described as a “serendipitous collection 

of over 100 paintings, sculptures, prints, 

drawings, and ‘but-is-it-art?’ objects that 

virtually span six decades of Philippine 

art history.” 9 It is reported that works 

like The Builders, Fernando Amorsolo’s 

Burning of Manila, Ofelia Gelvezon’s 

pinball series, and Brenda Fajardo’s 

“classic-inspired etchings” were part 

of this ensemble; and indeed they are 

in the collection. To prepare Chabet for 

his duties, the CCP secured for him a generous grant from the John D. Rockefeller Fund 

so that he could observe museum procedures, administration, and related techniques in 

the United States, from 1967 to 1969. Chabet, who was trained as an architect at the 

University of Santo Tomas and was cited by Galo Ocampo 10 as Chabet Rodriguez in an 

essay on Philippine art history as early as 1963, had no background as a curator or as 

an art historian and came into the scene with his modest reputation as an artist whom 

Arturo Luz deemed worthy to be exhibited in his eponymous gallery; he won First Prize 

at the Art Association of the Philippines annual competition in 1961. The registry of the 

collection lists Lee Aguinaldo’s Linear #24 (acrylic on wood) as one of the first to be 

bought before CCP’s inauguration; and Leonard Aguinaldo’s E-Maginings as one of the 

latest purchased in 2008. 


Left: Roberto Chabet. Untitled. 1976. 

19 x 28 cm 

Middle: Roberto Chabet. Untitled. 1976. 

Printed matter on illustration board. 

19 x 28 cm. 

Right: Roberto Chabet. Untitled. 

Inkwash on paper. 1965. 15.3 x 6.2 cm. 



Left: Ray Albano. Happy Birthday 

Suite #4. 1981. Acrylic on chipboard 

on wood. 121.9 x 106.7 cm. 

Middle: Ray Albano. Happy Birthday 

Suite # 1. 1986. 

Right: Ray Albano. Untitled. Comic 

magazine strip. 30.1 x 21.5 cm 

Oil on canvas. 84.5 x 181 cm. 



Third, the collection put together by the Museum of Philippine Art (MOPA), which 

was initially called by Albano as the Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines 

(CAMP) was given its own building, the Elk’s Club beside the United States Embassy and 

adjacent to the National Park. Albano, assumed office of the museum at the Center one 

fine day in 1970 when Chabet decided not to report for work. The latter rather cavalierly 

says in an interview that after his brief stint at the Center, Albano was “sort of taking 

over.” 11 The heir apparent, who opened CAMP with the Contemporary Art in the Philippines 

exhibition, served with two of the period’s liveliest minds, Marian Pastor Roces 

and Judy Freya Sibayan. Roces later worked at the Center in 1985 under Nonon Padilla 

after the death of Albano and was left minding the store when Marcos was deposed in 

1986; Sibayan returned in 1987 as director of the museum at the Center, now renamed 

Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines as an homage to Albano. 

The original CAMP was headed by Albano who was relieved from the post the 

same year it opened. Arturo Luz took over as museum director and was responsible in 

renaming it Museum of Philippine Art; the museum operated through the Center but was 

curatorially independent of it. In its effort to organize an exhibition on Philippine modern 

art, the MOPA solicited works from selected artists to form a collection envisioned to be 

on permanent display on the second floor of a high-ceilinged California mission-revival 

building. Luz vetted the artists and appealed to their generosity, though reserved the right 

to refuse, with no apologies. The gaps in this narrative of modernism were filled by the 

bequest of Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, the founding President of the Art Association of the 

Philippines, established in 1948, and luminary of Philippine art in the first half of the 

twentieth century. The MOPA presented important retrospectives of ground-breaking 

modernists, many of whom had been or were inevitably proclaimed National Artists by 

Imelda. In this space, Luz codified his scenographic signature of white-cube sleekness, 

brooking no awkward angle and placing pieces in order: the first one on view is the most 

important and impressive and that the arrangement defines the space, or better still, the 

interior design. He asked critics Leonidas Benesa and Cid Reyes to prepare the literature 

for exhibitions; and in order to sustain itself, the MOPA sold works, with a thirty 

percent commission on the sale. 12 This collection proved pivotal because it succeeded 

the Ateneo Art Gallery as a key node in the hoard of modern art in the Philippines. The 

Kalaw-Ledesma collection was inevitably withdrawn when the MOPA trove reverted to 

the CCP in the post-Marcos dispensation. 


The MOPA was dedicated to Philippine modern art in contradistinction to another 

Imelda brainchild, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila or the MET that was decidedly 

international in its projection, having opened in 1977 with loans from the Brooklyn 

Museum and other galleries or collections in the United States, 13 most notably Armand 

Hammer’s. Like MOPA, which commenced with a Federico Aguilar Alcuaz event under 

Luz’s directorship, the MET was directed by Arturo Luz. Through the years, it hosted the 

exhibitions of Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys, Byzantine icons, Yugoslav naïf paintings, the 

Vatican Collection, among countless others. The MET after Marcos, in some version of 

the developmentalist model, pursued an “art for all” vision, and interestingly this meant 

overturning the Luz museography. According to Felice Sta. Maria, MET President from 

1986 to 1993: “For Philippine museums, adherence to the Western museum paradigm 

led to an isolationist image, incomprehensible texts, and ineffective programs—a total 

museological dysfunction…It dampened the raison d’etre of museums as cultural and 

educational institutions for the general public.” 14 It may seem then that post-Marcos 

likewise meant post-Luz. 

Fourth, the somewhat unpredictable and unsystematic admission of gifts, contributions, 

and art left behind by artists, a practice that was practically dependent on the social 

networks of Imelda Marcos and Raymundo Albano, who did not have the budget to buy. 

There had been purchases after the Marcos period, governed by no clear-cut acquisition 

guidelines. This could be attributed to an anti-CCP outlook that infected the CCP, that 

is, an aversion to curatorial engineering. Reigning in a scenario soaked in people-power 

euphoria were the tedious and ultimately reactionary concepts of decolonization and 

indigenization, informed by the populist nationalism of a coalition of anti-dictatorship 

forces. The plurality that was unleashed by the fall of the house of Marcos found its expression 

in Piglas: Art at the Crossroads, the come-one, come-all exhibition at the Center 

in 1986 that, as it is in all days of deliverance, let the barbarians at the gate, anybody 

who thought of himself or herself as artist, crash the fold of culture’s grand catacomb. 

Marian Pastor Roces interjects: “It was extremely difficult to keep the exhibit free from 

the emotional issues surrounding the CCP itself. It was impossible to screen out works 

which did not seem to have anything to do with art at the crossroads. It was, to say the 

least, impossible to ‘curate.’” 15 This could only be indicative of the semblance of strict 

curatorial control in the previous years and the irresistible urge to negate it when the 

party was finally over. 

In light of these developments at the CCP, one way of piecing together the sources 

of the collection would be to match exhibitions at the CCP and the existence of objects 

in these exhibitions with the registry. For instance, Lani Maestro’s work in the collection 

might have come from her exhibition at the CCP Museum Hallway in 1981 based on the 

visual documentation. Cid Reyes also confides that Arturo Luz bought some of his works 

at his Chroma exhibition at the Hyatt in 1973 on behalf of Imelda; and one of these, the 

tondo Volta Redonda I, is in the collection. And we take note of a Betsy Westendorp de 

Brias exhibition of Marcosiana in 1975; a portrait of Ferdinand Marcos is in the storage. 

To summarize, the collection at the Center was assembled under the broad rubrics of 

commission, purchase, and gift. A curious note: In 1976, in time for the International 

Monetary Fund-World Bank Meeting, an exhibition of reproductions of modern masters 

(Picasso, Bacon, Magritte, Klee) was held at the CCP to shore up a proposal for a collection 

of international contemporary art at the Center. 

Ethic of Collecting 

It may be useful to tentatively assume that the logic of collecting at the Center was 

contingent on a level of connoisseurship represented by the taste of Imelda Marcos and 

the coterie around her: Leandro Locsin, Arturo Luz, and Roberto Chabet. At the outset, 

a particular type of internationalist abstraction of a late modern pedigree would frame 

this disposition, although Imelda also favored nativist inclinations in the works of, let us 

say, Carlos Francisco of Angono, Rizal. Locsin’s design of the building, a cross between 

brutalist minimalism and nativist quotation of the bahay kubo (nipa hut) morphology, 

set the tone, inflected by the exacting predilections of Luz and, later, Chabet. They 


epresented a kind of modernism that may be described as highly discriminating, maybe 

even elitist and indifferent to the Filipino penchant for ebullient decoration. And so to a 

certain extent, there could be a line drawn between the patronage of a dictatorship in the 

arts and a patronizing attitude among a segment of the intelligentsia towards a people 

who, it might have thought, needed a new cycle of modernist civilization, one that was 

not folkloric and pastoral. This was an approach foiled, however, by the “fiesta” ambience 

of Raymundo Albano’s CCP as well as of its satellites like Patio Kamalig and Third 

Level Gallery at Shoe Mart Cubao, which accommodated an array of hits and misses, 

from Fluxus to Mabini art, Russian socialist realism to Picasso. 

Another trajectory of collecting could have been, as earlier mentioned, the 

comradeship of the art unit’s longest-serving curator (1970-1985), Raymundo Albano. 

A preliminary look at the records of the collection reveals that a significant number of 

works are by artists with close artistic ties to Albano, including Rodolfo Samonte (who 

guest-curated Gridworks in 1975) and Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi. Albano was sui generis, 

an artist of ample affinities (painting, printmaking, performance, photography, installation), 

curator of myriad persuasions, and a prolific poet and writer who was able to 

articulate the philosophical underpinnings of his imaginings. Among his projects at the 

Center were the journal Philippine Art Supplement (1981); representation of Philippine 

art abroad (Paris, Fukuoka, ASEAN); art for the regions (Baguio, Los Baños, Cebu); the 

CCP Annual (1976); and outreach through the Community Involvement Program and 

regular art workshops centering on pattern and grid system and alternative materials. The 

liaison between experimentation and sorties into the gallery system prompted the artist 

Alan Rivera to quip that “conceptual art can be blue-chipped.” 16 

The shift from Albano to Chabet bears some elaboration. Albano’s bent was antithetical 

to Chabet’s insouciance, which was in turn akin to Luz’s sense of entitlement: 

they saw no need to explain the power to make art and produce its value, let alone lay the 

predicate of its alleged interrogation. For an artist like Chabet who sought to unravel the 

mystification of art through the mechanism of language, this streak of genius bordered on 

bogus high formalism. His ideas gained adherents beyond the Center because he taught 

at the University of the Philippines: the rarefied precincts of Diliman unfortunately bred 

acolytes who to this day deign very little tolerance for art that does not go their way. Chabet, 

who was prone to tearing things to pieces like Manuel Duldulao’s book in CCP and 

a hand-out in MOPA, was the central intelligence of the Thirteen Artists Award (1970), 

which raised the consciousness for artists who demonstrated a “recentness that hopes to 

endure.” 17 He waxed optimistic on its commencement: “They are a new generation of 

artists that promise to dominate Philippine art…Their works show recentness, a turning 

away from past, familiar modes of artmaking…(made) credible by a keen awareness of 

artistic problems, an articulate command of means to pursue innovative solutions…a 

confident commitment to ideas…Their influence is being felt in the works of other young 

artists…They have accelerated the motion initiated by our earlier modernists…they 

constantly restructure, restrengthen and renew artmaking and art thinking that lend viability 

to Philippine art.” Above all, they have ambition: “In this exhibition we have in 

evidence a certain expansiveness of scale and largeness of concept that are intimations in 

which the promise each artist has shown in recent years is finding fulfillment.” 18 These 

are lofty words, but the recipients through time could no longer be exclusively tied to 

Chabet’s discernment. Also, Albano’s CCP Annual in hindsight may have been more 

generative: “The essential irony of the annual is that all the works are test-markers for 

things to expect in the future. The works are highly contemporary, which means that 

they are risk-takers, transitory. They have not been validated yet, so to speak, and they 

may look like diversions or ends to a series. But it is this risk taking that artist’s works 

become useful in questioning and provoking certain attitudes. There are no perfected 

works here (there may be some masterpieces) but, eventually, we will realize that many 

prove to be sparks of innovative ideas, pivotal points.” 19 The relationship between the 

Thirteen Artists award exhibitions and the CCP Annual merits further study. 

Finally, the practice of collecting art at the Center was preceded by a more institutional 

method of collection evidenced by the spaces devoted to the ethnographic and 


archaeological collections of the landowner-interior designer Arturo de Santos and the 

dealer-couturier Potenciano Badillo, principally consisting of trade ware, ceramics, and 

Maranao and Maguindanao artifacts. It is said that Imelda promised the two collectors 

a building to house their holdings; and in fact piles had been driven in an area close to 

the Folk Arts Theater for this purpose. But plans fell through. After the Marcoses were 

forced out of the palace in 1986, Marian Pastor Roces, curator of the newly formed Museo 

ng Kalinangang Pilipino, returned the pieces to their owners. We mark this moment 

of collecting at the Center because its presence may help us understand more clearly 

the invented distinction between “fine art” and “ethnology,” on the one hand, and how 

these two genus of objects could come together under the aegis of museumification as 

heritage or antiquity or commodity, on the other. These are aspects of modernity that are 

imperative, because tressorial, and moreover part of wealth that is Filipiniana. We must 

remember that when the Marcoses left the Philippines, the revolutionary government of 

Corazon Aquino confiscated part of the Marcos art collection, ranging from Raphael to 

Zurbaran. Christie’s auctioned off some of these pieces on behalf of the Presidential Commission 

on Good Government in 1991, with the proceeds of the sale funding the country’s 

Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Earlier, the auction house peddled furniture, 

silver, and decorative accessories from the family’s town house and apartment in New 

York City. The catalogue reports that a number of Impressionist and modern works were 

still being tracked down, including Monet’s La pluie and L’eglise a la Seine; Renoir’s 

Jeune fille au bord de l’eau; and Picasso’s Reclining Woman and Head of a Woman. In 

other words, collecting at the Center was paved by a deep provenance of collecting in 

the Philippines by both the old rich and arrivistes, from Felipe Hidalgo to Luis Araneta 

to Leandro Locsin. 

The Modern as Collectible 

With the collection in place, a little more than a thousand odd pieces in total, this 

exhibition charts the coordinates across which objects make sense as things within 

a contrived scheme, a curatorial intervention in our own time: the new, the now, the 

next—terms referring to modernity and its critical inheritance. This is a first foray and 

therefore fraught with inconsistencies and plagued by theoretical problems. But before 

such, typologies at this point are de rigueur. We cast a taxonomic web to catch a better 

vantage of the collection: 

1. Art history: The collection may be viewed art historically as representing types of 

Philippine modernism but not necessarily in linear mode: 

a) Incipient: from the Triumvirate to Thirteen Moderns 

b) Neorealist and Philippine Art Gallery cohort: from School of Paris to 

non-objective to David Cortez Medalla 

c) Abstract: geometric and gestural, with Arturo Luz represented with the 

most number of works 

d) Avant-garde/Conceptualist, with one flank moving towards greater 

self-referentiality, and the other towards greater plurality, including Roberto 

Chabet’s 12-piece steel installation Hurdling and Santiago Bose’s door pieces 

e) Neofigurative, with printmaking as dominant medium and access of women 

artists to the scene and the canon; and Bendedicto Cabrera’s Larawan 

series as watershed 

f) Expressionist, including the large works of Jaime de Guzman 

g) Social Realist, which has minimal representation 

2. Will to form (Aesthetic Urge) 

a) Play: experimental, ephemeral, anti-art, anti-museum 

b) Essence: abstraction, action painting, formalism, language games 

c) Culture: local color, identity, motif 

d) History: colonial critique, narrative 


3. Logic of practice 

a) Performative, including the painterly: dematerialization 

b) Reprographic: multiple circulation 

c) Expressive and expressionist: classicism, sense of beauty, anxiety, abjection 

d) Picturesque and kitsch: idealization of everyday life, commodification 

of idyll and folk resilience 

NEW: Bago ang Lahat 

First, the modern is ordained, the new is positioned at the outset, with Edades’s The 

Builders as a contentious locus classicus and myth. 20 Around it are ciphers of an earlier 

academism or conservatism embodied by such exemplars as Fernando Amorsolo and 

Guillermo Tolentino, and a relatively unacknowledged liminal figure in the emergent 

modernist enterprise, Diosdado Lorenzo. Implicated in this incipient system of the historiography 

of modernism is the temper of Leandro Locsin and Arturo Luz in the context 

of geometric abstraction and internationalist architecture. The so-called Triumvirate of 

Victorio Edades, Carlos Francisco, and Galo Ocampo plays out here, as well as its furtherance 

in the much-profiled but ultimately apocryphal Thirteen Moderns. Beyond the 

Ash Can school of American realism and post-Impressionism of Edades lies the domain 

of neorealism, a Filipino neologism in modern art vocabulary of which cubism was the 

dominant aesthetic. The neorealist style, which was honed through exhibitions at the 

Philippine Art Gallery, had broad sympathies, extending to the art brut experiments of 

David Cortez Medalla. A treasure in the collection is a suite of the latter’s drawings of 

Fernando Zobel lecturing on art history at the Ateneo de Manila University in the fifties; 

along with Leonidas Benesa and Emmanuel Torres, both of whom became Philippine 

modern art’s leading critics, and Tessie Ojeda, who married Luz, Medalla was a student of 

Zobel who was at once painter, patron, and polemicist on Filipino culture. 21 Needless to 

say, the collection counts several Zobels as its cherished possessions. Concomitantly, the 

belief in the international, with Zobel as a foreign element in the vicinity, was overriding, 

a testament to Philippine cosmopolitan culture. This much Luz intuited: “I have a feeling, 

my work included, that most of our paintings and sculptures are a reflection of something 

happening worldwide, and for want of a better word, this trend is now being identified as 

‘international.’ In fact we always refer to it as being an international phenomenon, and 

in the process, this trend obliterates national characteristics, and transcends geographical 

boundaries.” 22 Zobel may have been the vector of the international in the nation, while 

Medalla referenced a post-national Philippine art outside the nation. 

Moreover, this section integrates the transition from abstraction to what may be 

provisionally called neofiguration from which an emergent social realism, the style 

that undermined the argument of Marcos development partly through Marxist thought, 

derived parts of its grammar. Here the works of Solomon Saprid, Ang Kiukok, Danilo 

Dalena, and Benedicto Cabrera are remarkable in relation to, for instance, the abstract 

expressionist pieces of Jose Joya, who with Napoleon Abueva, represented the country 

at the Venice Biennale in 1964. The alternation between deformation/abjection and nostalgia/melancholy 

condenses in this kind of expressionism of folksy and urban grit and 

post-abstract graphic art. It frustrates the heroism of the painterly stroke, the disinterest 

of the perspicacious line, and the kitsch of late neorealism’s penchant for vendors, shanties, 

and New Society propaganda. 

The search for a level of Filipino identity bedeviled Philippine art in the seventies. 

After 1986, with the restoration of so-called democratic space and its attendant ethos, 

a template was contemplated to nuance this issue, proceeding from the revived CAMP 

helmed by Nonon Padilla who drew up a ten-year program of three phases: the dialectical, 

questioning aesthetics, identity, issues and orientation; the analysis of the visual arts 

as a reflection of Philippine culture; and the definition of Philippine culture as expressed 

in contemporary visual arts. The Sensuous Eye (1987) evolved out of the need for this 

introspection, as well as for trying to address gaps in curatorship in the Philippines, which 

according to Judy Freya Sibayan “has not reached a level of systems.” Thus, the intent of 

the exhibition was both analytic and curatorial: to “re-think how Filipino artists create and 


why they create the way they do,” on the one hand, and to advance the central aesthetic 

thesis that “ours is an art of objectifying visual pleasure,” 23 on the other. The walls were 

painted peach, alluding to the “physicalization of pleasure”: the exhibitionary and the 

artistic merge. The critic Cid Reyes was able to propose categories of analysis for this 

particular pursuit of a Filipino aesthetic in painting: frontality of image; fragmentation: 

openness of forms; décor: enhancements of the picture plane; horror vacui: appropriation 

of space; ‘focal point’: leading the eye to pasture; recession: shallow space; and color: 

radiation of energy.” 24 

This was the second and may have been the last serious attempt of the CCP to 

strive for discursive density in relation to its collection. The first one was done in 1980 

with the exhibition curated by the critic and printmaker Rodolfo Paras Perez titled Five 

Directions; it attempted to map out “for meditation the various permutations, perplexities, 

the five identifiable tendencies, the ambitions deemed characteristic of Philippine 

art” 25 : non-objectivist, macro-visionist, magic realist, Laguna lake shore, conceptualist. 

Curiously missing was the social realist aesthetic that had already potently posited its 

agenda since 1971, finding its impetus with the founding of Kaisahan in 1976. Surely, 

the omission was obvious: the MOPA might not have wanted to present art that tried to 

disclose an abject social condition, a far cry from Imelda’s idealized City of Man, for 

which the government was responsible. This policing was, therefore, political, something 

that might have also permeated the choices for the Thirteen Artists. As social realist 

Renato Habulan would reflect on his belated conferment in 1990 along with confreres 

Pablo Baens Santos, Edgar Talusan Fernandez, Antipas Delotavo, and Neil Doloricon: 

“Our selection was a vindication of work that was deserving but could not be displayed 

because of the dissenting political implication they held during the Marcos era. We 

may have even deserved nomination in the 1970s, but this could not happen under the 

(Marcos)administration.” 26 This umbrage is not as simple as it looks, because on the 

other hand, the modernist canon makers in New York like Museum of Modern Art’s 

Alfred Barr during the Cold War would juxtapose the freedom of abstract expressionism 

with the fascism of socialist realism. 

Marian Pastor Roces reviewed Five Directions and thought it iterative and recursive: 

it “moves into itself and around and over again, in a steady, non-corrective, immutable, 

static, state.” 27 While viewed as curatorially faulty, this exhibition, along with The Sensuous 

Eye, constitutes the only consolidated effort of the Center to assess its collection, 

coextensively and implicitly with its exhibitions, in relation to both aesthetics and art 

history. From this stock taking, we could infer artistic leanings in terms of themes, forms, 

and ideas, on the one hand, and a deeper structure of an aesthetic sensibility that is constantly 

eluded by its grail that is the Filipino, on the other. 

NOW: Simula Pa Lamang 

The turn away from neorealism towards the contemporary may have been heralded 

by Raymundo Albano at the Center, who insisted on working on the now, its labor as 

the advent of an alternative universe that was present—and that was only the beginning. 

Albano widened the parameters of art and invested the modern not only with the notion 

of the new, but the urgency of the now, its being essential in development that must seize 

the day, demanding quick action and being forward looking, the better perhaps to slay 

the feudal time of oligarchy that Marcos so despised, assiduously tried to dismantle, and 

replaced with technocrats and cronies of a developing nation state. 

It is in this segment of the exhibition that the documentation of the projects at the 

Center becomes extremely helpful. Albano diligently annotated them, dutifully wrote 

curatorial briefs, and kept photographs in tidy volumes that serve as our map to the 

labyrinths of the spaces and the laboratories that they had become in the seventies and 

eighties. We may designate this juncture as the carnival world and adventure time of Albano, 

one of the most solvent periods in Philippine art history, rivaled only by the hectic 

routine at the Philippine Art Gallery and the steady production of protest art during the 

Marcos administration. 


NEXT: Abangan ang Susunod 

Roberto Chabet was the fountainhead of the visual arts at the CCP at its inception, 

cobbling together a fortress of state-controlled culture for the masses with a motley crew 

of Martial Law architects, high-society personalities, and academics—from Juan Ponce 

Enrile to Antonio Madrigal to Fr. Horacio de la Costa. But Chabet’s presence as curator 

was short-lived. His lasting legacy, however, is the Thirteen Artists Award that he imagined 

as signaling art on the threshold. He was proud of the first laureates, though had 

reservations about the second, which he thought were mostly “mediocre.” According to 

him: “In the second Thirteen Artists show…I had to include things which I didn’t know 

about. I was surprised to find them included in the show. Somebody had disorganized 

the show!” 28 

This is vintage Chabet, who has only contempt for artists who try too hard to do 

work that looks like art, calling them “the acrylic embroiderers” and the “San Andres sitting 

circle,” comprising the new Mabini artists, and are “nincompoops.” 29 To distinguish 

himself from these wastrels in his estimation, he casts himself as “experimental,” the 

adjective he uses to describe what he had been doing; and as critical, taking on the task 

of a critic who questions the “nature of art.” 30 In this modality of valorizing the mind 

over the hand, he would advocate, for instance, the use of the “professional craftsman” to 

execute the artist’s design: “It’s the only way to do it.” 31 This is the avant-garde capital 

that Chabet arrogated unto himself, arbitrarily of course. 

Chabet would disclose in an interview years later that the CCP was “not doing its 

function properly.” When queried what this function was, he retorted: “I really don’t know. 

Maybe that’s another reason why I resigned. I don’t know and I don’t care.” 32 This may 

be symptomatic of the rift between Chabet and the enviable lush afterlife of conceptual 

art after his departure from the CCP; it also betrays the hauteur, conceit, and his inability 

to make himself accountable to the modernist obligations of reflexivity. 

This exhibition recalls the gains of the Thirteen Artists recognition not only through 

the collection, but also through the work of the recipients of the award, specifically the 

installations of Reginald Yuson and Poklong Anading that reference, for the former, a 

Japanese garden of bullet shells, and, for the latter, debris of the city’s road painted in the 

colors of rags. Both projects are at once gritty and melancholic, testifying to the poetics 

of ruination resting on a building resting on land resting on water. This should be able to 

glimpse a future that is the heritage of this coveted honor, for good or for ill. 

Inchoate Notes 

This exhibition of the visual arts collection of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 

occasions a probe of the history of its becoming, the very nature of the collecting 

impulse, and inexorably, of the construction of the collective. A couple of conclusions 

could be put on the table. 

First are the intricate relationships among institutions that circulated art that deserved 

and was desired to be collected as property, as well as index of progress, refinement, 

radical expression, experiment, and patrimony. Here specific codes of quality were ratified 

through sheer confirmation of taste in acquisition, exhibition making, workshops, 

cohort formation, and award giving (Thirteen Artists in 1970 and National Artist in 

1972). In this situation, the CCP as the state’s premier bureaucracy for modern art was 

involved in generating symbolic capital for objects that were not merely regarded as 

species of art history or the history of art, which implied some kind of progression from 

a perceived indigenous origin to a telos of sophistication, but as goods of the market 

and artifacts of a museum that meet certain standards and cannot be easily reduced as 

instruments of the economies in which they are entangled. This confluence would be 

facilitated by the personage and prerogative of Arturo Luz, who at one time directed 

three art institutions—the Design Center Philippines (1973), the Museum of Philippine 

Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila – and owned the Luz Gallery, heir of the 

Philippine Art Gallery and Manila’s most respected art gallery at that time; according 

to Raymundo Albano, the latter was the only platform for the unsaleable conceptualist 

art 33 and, in fact was contracted to program and manage MOPA’s exhibitions. It may not 

be too imprudent to aver then that many of the artists exhibited at the MOPA were also 


in the roster of the Luz Gallery. In other words, there seemed to be a singular circuit 

through which a distinct mode of modernism found its relay: this was for all intents and 

purposes on the watch of Luz, who was widely respected for his mandarin sensibility and 

fastidiousness as artist, curator, and administrator. We note this tyranny of taste: “Actually, 

my principal reason was simply to provide art with the setting and importance it 

deserves. Bad painting deserves obscurity, but painting that deserves to be shown must 

Left: Arturo Luz. For Xavier Gonzales, 

1978. Painted burlap on wood, 

102.9 x 221.6 cm 

Middle: Arturo Luz, Untitled. 2007. Metal 

Right: Arturo Luz. Nightglow. 1960. 

Oil on canvas. 84.5 x 181 cm. 



be shown well. Surprisingly, virtually all other galleries in Manila ignore this obvious 

truth…More obvious though less popular is my notion that galleries have to be dictatorial 

in matters of taste and quality…The point is that galleries have certain functions and 

responsibilities other than to make profit…Above all, it (the gallery) should mold taste 

and exercise a certain degree of critical judgment.” 34 This acuity in hindsight made the 

Gallery a veritable bellwether of the first Thirteen Artists awardees in 1970: in 1968, the 

20 Artists exhibition was practically the mirror-image of the latter. 

Moreover, Luz proved to be a vital element in the art world because of his links 

to a very influential circle of standard-setters and opinion-makers in the sixties and the 

seventies. We may trace the lineage of this elite to Fernando Zobel whose role as artist, 

benefactor, and intellectual shaped hegemonic formations in the art world. His bequest 

to the Ateneo was the nucleus of the Ateneo Art Gallery, the first institution of modern 

art in the Philippines that partly enhanced the auspice of Luz by way of exhibitions of 

his art, including the ten-year retrospective that Ateneo professor and critic Emmanuel 

Torres curated in 1966, the same year Luz received the Republic Heritage Award. Torres 

likewise wrote a book on his drawings and at one time conceptualized an exhibition of 

Philippine art, running the length from the nineteenth century master Juan Luna to Luz. 

This clique also included the pianist and theater artist Leandro Locsin, chief architect of 

Imelda and the Ayalas, and later Roberto Chabet, who exhibited his early Malang-like 

works at the Luz Gallery. More importantly, they thought highly of each other. When 

asked who among the local painters of his time he esteemed most, Zobel would point to 

Luz if he “had to name a single person...his clarity, the profound honesty of his work, 

the elegance of his restraint, have to do with everything I admire.” 35 Luz for his part is 

indebted to Chabet for the evolution of his collages. The crucial coordinates would be 

Luz, Locsin, and Chabet. Locsin and Luz may have been kindred spirits. A story has 

gone around that one time when the two were asked to select ten objects, they had similar 

choices. They were attuned to the same wavelength in terms of their regard for space, 

intellect, and class affectation. Albano, who came from Ilocos Norte and was not reared 

in privilege, did not belong to this orbit. 

All told, as Alfredo Roces would put it: “Luz had the gallery, Locsin had the building 

and clientele and Zobel had the theories and even the patronage.” 36 In this regard, Tessie 

Luz relates that “there was a small group of collectors who revolved around Zobel and 

Lindy Locsin.” 37 Furthermore, Zobel had a hand in the founding of the Ayala Museum 

in 1961, on the heels of the establishment of the Ateneo Art Gallery, the Luz Gallery, 

and the Lopez Memorial Museum the previous year; it opened to the public in 1967. 

In 1974, it moved to Makati in a building designed by Locsin. The Ayalas nurtured the 

country’s oldest business house and was its pioneer monopolist. 38 Zobel’s cousin Jaime 

Zobel de Ayala, the industrialist and tycoon whose family practically owns the financial 

district Makati and the country’s gated enclaves, was CCP’s first Executive Director 

and President. These connections are very telling. The history of Ayala as a firm and 

proto-conglomerate and how Jaime would try to elide class in the production of culture 

through the CCP are equally compelling: “The Center, they say, is only for the affluent. 


It is not committed because it does not take a class stand. It does not identify itself with 

the masses and is not led by the ideology of the present struggle. True, the Center does 

not and cannot adopt this kind of orientation. It does not divide the people into classes. 

But it is committed. Its commitment is to art and art alone. It shall not be subservient to 

any ideological belief.” 39 

Finally, the developmentalist bent that guided the policies and programs of the 

Center, as previously indicated, may have conspired to craft a cosmopolitan aesthetic 

that principally dwelled on design. This is validated by a strong investment in design 

that encompassed both the primitive and the avant-garde as could be discerned, again, 

in the initiatives of Luz at the Design Center Philippines where he developed buri and 

hand-made paper as local materials within an interior-design context; his burlap series 

provides the nexus to art. Therefore, the intersection between fine art, interior design, 

architecture, tourism, convention city building (hotels, theaters, coliseums), and other 

Marcos ambitions brought together practitioners who built edifices and decorated them 

with art, furniture, and antiques. The apartments Locsin designed in Makati and how 

Left: David Cortez Medalla. Parables 

of Friendship. 1984. Oil on canvas. 

50.8 x 76.2 cm. 

Middle: J. Elizalde Navarro. 1981. 

Homage to Carlos V. Francisco. 

Acrylic and oil on canvas. 86 x 160 cm. 

Right: Hernando R. Ocampo. Homage to 

Diego Silang.1976. Oil on canvas. 

84.5 x 181 cm. 


of the Philippines 

their interiors were done may be exemplary. But more than this, as David Cortez Medalla 

confided in an interview, it was the shift of the art scene from Manila, which was bohemia 

to the culturati of a fabled era, to Makati that decisively altered the kind of modernism 

that was to take root. 40 The Luz Gallery in Herran moved to Makati in a Locsin building 

along EDSA in 1966; and Luz secured commissions for public art in the area. We are of 

the mind that this transfer, which according to Medalla (represented in When Attitudes 

Become Form in 1969; Documenta in 1972; Venice in 1980) deprived modernism of its 

social texture and made it pretentiously cerebral, aborted a potentially robust avant-garde 

that was nipped in the bud by the high modernism of Luz and Chabet. It was only during 

Albano’s tenure at the CCP that this orientation was meaningfully reversed, but only to 

the degree that it tried to simulate an artificial condition of “happening” minus political 

happenstance. 

This developmentalist framework could be key to the unevenness of the collection, 

a sign of the kind of the fulcrum on which a native/national, truly neo-ethnic Filipino 

teetered. It is a balance that may have also informed the expressions of artists active at the 

Center: the avant-garde ethnomusicology of Lucrecia Kasilag and Jose Maceda (whose 

Ugnayan broadcast sound across Manila through the radio on new year’s day in 1974) 

and the modernist theater of Rolando Tinio who translated with irresistible rigor Euro- 

American canonical pieces into cogent Filipino. Ballet and folkloric dance companies; 

piano concerts in basktetball courts; philharmonic orchestras and art workshops for children, 

opera troupes and local playwrighting were developmentalist endeavors that reached 

out to the vast masses of Filipinos. Tinio had the perfect formulation for this program: 

“The classics of the world are like natural resources; we mine them and manufacture 

from them products for local consumption, first and foremost.” 41 But Albano was able 

to explicate this rationale not so much for development as for the process of developing 

something unknown: “For an establishment to accept and promote such unrecognizable 

visual propositions was rather controversial, and yet it was the only workable plan possible. 

Exhibiting more established works would be duplicating the commercial galleries. 

A permanent collection is not possible to have because the CCP has no building and 

accompanying budget yet. A bias for interdisciplinary tendency stems from the fact that 

the Cultural Center promotes the ‘seven arts’ together.” 42 


Endnotes 

1. Albano, Raymundo. 1981. “Developmental 

Art in the Philippines.” Philippine 

Art Supplement. Vol 2 Number 4, p. 15. 

2. Luz, Arturo. “Filipino Painting.” n. d. 

3. Albano 1981, p. 15. 



6. An account points to other donations 

like a mural from Fernando Zobel 

and a curtain from Federico Aguilar 

Alcuaz, both of which seem not to exist; 

mentioned as well are the collections of 

Antonio Bantug and Arsenio Escudero. 

See De la Torre, Visitacion. 1984. 

Cultural Center of the Philippines: 

Crystal Years. Manila: Cultural Center of 

the Philippines, p. 19. 

7. Locsin, Leandro. 1969. “Physical 

Aspects of the Center.” Inaugural 

Program. Manila: Cultural Center of the 

Philippines. 

8. Reyes, Cid. 1989. Conversations on 

Philippine Art. Manila: Cultural Center of 

the Philippines, p. 126. 

9. De la Torre 1984, pp. 132-133. 

10. Ocampo, Galo. 1963. A Brief History 

of the Development of Modern Art in the 

Philippines: From 1928 to 1962. Manila: 

National Museum, p. 32. 

11. Reyes 1989, p. 126. 

12. Interview with Purissima Benitez- 

Johannot, curatorial staff at MOPA, 

December 2008. 

13. For thorough discussion of the MET, 

see Paulino, Roberto. 2005. “The Metropolitan 

Museum of Manila.” Pananaw 5. 

Manila: National Commission for Culture 

and the Arts, pp. 30-47. 

14. Paulino 2005, p. 37. 

15. Pastor Roces, Marian. 1986. Piglas: 

Art at the Crossroads. Manila: Cultural 

Center of the Philippines, p. 5. 

16. Rivera, A. F. Alfon. 1981. “Art at the 

Third Level.” Philippine Art Supplement. 

Vol 2 Number 1, p.16. 

17. 1988 Thirteen Artists Brochure. 

Manila: Cultural Center of the 

Philippines, n. p. 

18. 1988 Thirteen Artists Brochure, n.p. 

19.Tence Ruiz, Jose. 2000. “Atras/Avant: 

Lessons from a Continuing Reinvention 

of the Thirteen Artists.” Pananaw 4. 

Manila: National Commission for Culture 

and the Arts, p. 56. 

Second, Marian Pastor Roces advances the astute insight that the CCP visual art 

collection may be viewed as spinning off discretely from the art and exhibitions of the 

seventies at the Center. 43 This stems from the fact that the experiments then were basically 

anti-object, keen on dematerialization, basking in ephemera. And so, it may be 

argued that this acumen was an immanent critique of the necessity of a collection at that 

time and the way in which the collection festers in the current climate when first-world 

amenities are unavailable to arrest the entropy of things and to contain the attrition of the 

collection, tasks that are well-nigh impossible in an unindustrialized economy presided 

over mostly by rent-seeking elites. Roces, who conjures the image of the collection as 

tumor, speculates that this may have been an uncosmopolitan manner of sustaining the 

cosmopolitan ethos of collecting. And she has a very interesting case to make because of 

two things: one is an antecedent modality of collecting through the endeavors of Luz in 

his gallery, which sold antiques apart from marketing fine art in the same space, as well 

as in MOPA, and second, the Filipiniana collection at the Center. This “ethnographic” 

strain in Luz, who extensively traveled and whose abstraction was inspired by temple 

and cloth in Asia, would nuance the De Santos and Badillo collection at the Center, supposedly 

curated as objets d’art by Locsin, whose family in 2008 loaned to Ayala Museum 

its exceptional reserve of gold and donated to the National Museum Felix Resurreccion 

Hidalgo’s The Assassination of Governor Bustamante and His Son in 2006. In Fernando 

Zobel’s book Philippine Religious Imagery, he states that Luz “owns the finest existing 

collection of statuettes in the popular style” and that Locsin and his wife Cecilia of the 

wealthy Yulo clan “have a small but very select collection consisting of carefully chosen 

examples of every style.” 44 The Locsins, who have held the country’s most important 

private collection, were also interested in archaeology, having written the important book 

Oriental Ceramics Discovered in the Philippines (1967), a culmination of their excavations 

in Sta. Ana in Manila. This confirms that the Locsin-Ayala-Luz—and, of course, 

Marcos—loop perseveres. 

But this anti-object mentality in the conceptualist model may have in the same 

unnerving vein taken a different twist in the Marcos matrix, with things aleatory and 

embryonic mutating into things spiritual, the inverse of the material or the materialist; the 

scientific; or the rational. Emblematic is Jaime Zobel de Ayala’s statement: “The Center 

is deeply relevant to our times because a recourse to the spirit and things spiritual is very 

much warranted in a time of material crisis.” 45 And surely, this appeal to the ineffable may 

have been Imelda’s access to art, the best way for her to kindle kinship with artists. As 

gifted essayist and speechwriter Kerima Polotan Tuvera puts it: “Though she had never 

written or painted, and what singing she had done had been on small stages, she understood 

the artistic alchemy, and if she did not burn deeply with the fever that raged in all artists, 

she nursed a touch of that sweet delirium, and many saw in her a kindred soul.” Thus, 

Imelda, whose penchant for adornment and decoration – indeed, beautification -- imbued 

her festivalist imaginary, was, therefore, attracted to art, a fascination that required no 

exegesis. This rambling rumination is fabulist: “I like the modern. I like the abstract. I 

like them because they get me thinking. You know, sometimes I do not understand them. 

I like things I do not understand because they make me curious. I do not claim to be a 

technician or a scientist in the arts. But, as I always say, when I like something, I like it 

even though I have no reason for it. Just like friends. There are friends you like but you 

don’t know the reason.There are paintings you like but you don’t know the reason.” 46 

It is this reverie that coddled the dreams of Imelda of the Platonic ideals of the true, the 

good, and the beautiful. When Imelda, a woman of appreciable beauty and charisma, 

spoke of these virtues, it looked and sounded exceedingly credible. 

Finally, and this is the other path through which the “collecting” at the Center may 

have been paved: the conceptualist posture to question the basis of artness, or its objecthood 

within the spectrum of institutional critique, only that in this setting the institution 

itself of authoritarian rule was spared. Still, the instinct to appropriate material culture 

of everyday life and behold it on the plinths of the museum at the Center furthered the 

conceptualist mindset to restore the integrity of the object before it is devoured by the 

modernism of art or the mercantilism of the market, to dematerialize it conceptually in 

a paradoxically sensory and intersubjective, even immersive, atmosphere. 


20. Reyes 1989, p 96. 

21. See Zobel de Ayala, Fernando. 1963. 

Philippine Religious Imagery. Manila: 

Ateneo de Manila University. Reyes 

1989, p. 62. 

22. Sibayan, Judy Freya. 1987. “Preface.” 

The Sensous Eye. Manila: Cultural Center 

of the Philippines, n. p. 

23. Reyes, Cid. 1987. “The Sensuous 

Eye: A Survey of Philippine Art Focusing 

on the Filipino Artists’ Vision of Beauty.” 

The Sensuous Eye. Manila: Cultural 

Center of the Philippines, n. p. 

24. Pastor Roces, Marian. 1980. “Five 

Directions in a Steady State.” Philippine 

Art Supplement. November - December, 

p. 8. 

25. Tence Ruiz 2000, p. 59. 

26. Pastor Roces 1980, p. 9. 

27. Reyes 1989, p. 126, 

28. Reyes 1989, p. 124. 

29. Reyes 1989, p. 124. 

30. Reyes 1989, p. 125. 

31. Reyes 1989, p. 126. 

32. Reyes 1989, p. 163. 

33. Paulino 2005, p. 35. 

34. Reyes 1989, p. 54. 

35. Reyes 1989, p. 98. 

36. Reyes 1989, p. 184. 

37. See Baluyut, Pearlie Rose. 2005. 

“The Ayala Museum: A Site of Culture, 

Capital, and Displaced Colonial Desire.” 

Pananaw 5. Manila: National Commisiion 

for Culture and the Arts, pp. 6-17. 

38. De la Torre 1984, 51, 

39. Interview with David Cortez Medalla 

by author, May 2006, Madrid, Spain. 

40. De la Torre 1984, p. 90. 


42. Interview with Marian Pastor Roces 

by author, December 2008. 

43. Zobel de Ayala 1963, pp. 35-36. 

44. Zobel de Ayala, Jaime. May 31, 1970. 

“A Closer Look at the CCP: Asia’s Mecca 

of the Arts.” No publication details. 

45. Pastor Roces, Marian. 1987. “Beauty 

or Wis: A Philippine Dilemma.” The 

Sensuous Eye. Manila: Cultural Center of 

the Philippines, n. p. 

46. Reyes 1989, p. 101. 

47. Pastor Roces 1987, n. p. 

48. For this essay, the author consulted: 

Newman, Michael and Jon Bird. 1989. 

Rewriting Conceptual Art. London: 

Reaktion Books; Bernstein, J. M. 

2006. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late 

Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. 

Stanford: Stanford University Press; 

Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 

1950s-1980s. New York: Queens Museum 

of Art. 

49. Bernstein 2006, p. 1. 

50. Lloyd, David and Paul Thomas. 

1998. Culture and the State. New York: 

Routledge, p. 1. 

The author wishes to thank Purissima 

Benitez-Johannot, Marian Pastor Roces, 

and Judy Freya Sibayan for their 

generous insights. 

While some artists celebrated conceptualism, others were suspicious. Alfredo Roces 

would forward the opinion that “conceptual art is essentially an intellectual medium, a 

mental process” and he could not see it thriving in an “anti-intellectual” locale. 47 This 

may be supplemented by the lament of Chabet and Albano about Filipino critics; Albano, 

for instance, thinks that Emmanuel Torres’s tenor is too poetic. Marian Pastor Roces 

agrees, alerting us to a language that is florid, cardiac, verging on “swardspeak,” or gay 

lingo. Then she continues: “But you see, nobody likes critics; our entire sociological 

profile denies the very notion of pointing a judgmental finger at another.” 48 How could 

have conceptualism flourished then without a flourishing art criticism? Was this vacuum 

filled by the artist-curators like Chabet and Albano as an extension of their conceptualist 

practice? 

Such incommensurability is intrinsic in conceptualism itself, and this exhibition 

affords us the opportunity to look at its appropriation in Philippine art. Several publications 

and exhibitions have tried to discuss conceptualism in its philosophical and global 

registers under cognate terms like post-object art, art-as-idea, theoretical art, and so on. 49 

The line of flight of this reconsideration begins with the autonomy of the aesthetic as 

productive of the alienation and fragmentation obtaining in a modern society, or a society 

that is undergoing modernization. Part of the conceptualist venture was to undermine the 

sensuous particularity on which the universal aesthetic rests as a critique of modernism, 

but paradoxically through the recovery of the sensory that has been institutionalized as 

art, fetishized as commodity. This enterprise runs into thickets of internal contradictions, 

indeed ineluctably resulting in a failed negation: art’s formalism proves to be inescapable 

no matter how it tries to conflate itself with everyday life and non-art, and expectantly 

to disappear into the energy of the common. Artists might have taken Adorno’s fantasy 

too seriously: “To make things of which we do not know what they are.” 50 

Chabet belabored this in vain because he was confined to the Center and his own 

cult thereafter, which instrumentalized art as regulation of, precisely, everyday life; 

CCP’s outreach later with Albano at the helm may have colonized it as well in another 

modality of discrimination or being discriminating. This aporia might mean that their 

postmodernity was a continuity of modernism, and in some respects not even a critical 

nor a postcolonial one. This revisit is extremely indispensable in light of contemporary 

art’s complicity in it and the fact that its binary critique of art history is long over, having 

been absorbed into its domain as a genus, settling into, alas, a collection. There are many 

ways to spin this problematic, and the exhibition nudges us to introspect on a multitude 

of hints: if Philippine modernity at all reached a level of aesthetic autonomy; if Filipino 

conceptual artists were persistent amateurs who failed to philosophize and therefore 

were not up to conceptualism’s metalinguistic demands, except perhaps for Hernando 

R. Ocampo, whom Albano thinks is conceptualism’s forerunner, Albano himself, David 

Cortez Medalla, Judy Freya Sibayan, Marian Pastor Roces by way of her idiosyncratic 

writing, and perhaps Lani Maestro; if conceptualism in these parts was compromised 

because it failed to become activist and effected institutional critique; and other more 

painful possibilities. 

In 1867, Matthew Arnold declared that “Culture suggests the idea of the State.” 

David Lloyd and Paul Thomas thread through this thought by saying that: “Both are 

given the role of furnishing sites of reconciliation for a civil and political society that 

is seen to be riven by conflict and contradiction. Both are seen as the sites in which the 

highest expressions of human being and human freedom are realized. Both are seen as 

hedges against the political anarchy of rapidly transforming societies.”51 This exhibition 

complicates this idea, as the ethical formation of a polity (nation state, democracy, 

revolution) emerges from the critique of the coloniality of culture (identity, development, 

subjectivity). 

The collection at the Center, therefore, may be subjected at this seminal stage of 

reconceiving it as property, as object, and as intellection. And it is most thrilling to just 

let it crawl out of the woodwork as a burdened corpus of things and deeds by privileged 

persons—be they the proletariat of a starving art world or potentates of an aggrandizing 

culture. In the Filipino culture of bereavement, this is our protracted padasal or prayer 

for repose to augur the babang luksa, the end of mourning and grief after forty years of 

trying to achieve fitting parting from relics. 


Prized Possessions: 

The Promise of the Contemporary 

in Philippine Art Competitions 

jay giovanni bautista 

It was in a painting competition that we had our first international recognition. At the 

Exposicion Nacional de Bellas Artes, there were earlier accounts that a Filipino student 

named Alfonso Calderon placed in 1866. What is certain is that a student Juan Novicio 

Luna won the silver medal at the same Madrid Art Exposition of 1881 for the seminal 

work, Death of Cleopatra, which he painted while on an excursion in Rome. Held every 

three years at the Salon in Madrid, the 26-year old Luna would even win the first gold 

medal for the masterpiece Spoliarium three years later. It will also be the same occasion 

that another Filipino named Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo will win the silver medal for 

his Virgenes Cristianas Expuetas al Papulacho which is now part of the Bangko Sentral 

ng Pilipinas Painting Collection. 

It has always been the young and uninitiated that the lure for recognition seems 

strongest. Founder Purita Kalaw-Ledesma told author Cid Reyes in an interview that not 

only did the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) become a formally organized art 

association; it also provided the venue for competition that has become the perennial rite 

of passage when Filipino artists were starting out. “The beauty of [AAP] competitions, 

[is that] students usually defeated their professors. This happened many times and that’s 

why we discovered many raw and emerging talents. [Juvenal] Sanso for example won 

first prize defeating his professors. I will not mention names, but time has proved that 

the judges were right about Sanso.” Kalaw-Ledesma recalls. 

AAP’s first offing in 1948 saw Carlos “Botong” Francisco winning first prize with 

Kaingin showing farmers tilling their fields. So playful was the 35 year-old future maestro 

as he was so engrossed with playing basketball in Angono that he would even fail to attend 

the awarding ceremonies scheduled at the National Museum (then at Herran) with 

an impatient President Elpidio Quirino and other guests waiting for him in vain. 

Through generations after, the AAP Art Competition saw the likes of National Artists 

Jose Joya and Arturo Luz, Fernando Zobel, Federico Alcuaz, and Roberto Chabet Rodriguez 

winning the coveted plum. Getting temporary access to the few public exhibition 

venues in the metropolis was more than enough to the then struggling painter in them. 

Art contests became more pertinent then since the exhibitions attracted collectors 

and gallery owners alike. Only a handful of exhibition venues and art dealers existed 

in the 1960s. To name a few spaces were the Philippine Art Gallery showroom along 

Arquiza street in Malate, Gallery 7 in Makati Merchandising Mart Bldg., and the new 

Luz Gallery that moved to E. Delos Santos Avenue. 

Among other initiatives to showcase Philippine art then, came from artists and art 

lovers themselves. Bencab opened Gallery Indigo, and F. Sionil Jose shared artworks 

with his book space at the Solidaridad Galleries located a block from it in 1967. The 

other galleries that followed suit would eventually become the venue for winners of art 

contests. These were Palette at Greenhills arcade, Capitol in Quezon City, Arts and Ends 

at the Savoy Hyatt Hotel, Gaerie Bleu at Rustan’s in Makati,and Gallery One at the PCIB 

building in San Juan, Rizal. 

With the inauguration of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1969, the Philippine 

art scene was altered to conform to the dictates of the “new society.” As we all know 

First Lady Imelda Marcos would be influential in calling the shots in the visual arts as 

she took care of the few artists she favored (they know who they are) to the detriment of 

the equally deserving painters but who did not have collectors. 


Don’t Touch the Wet Paint, To Each His Own 

In a country where the arts get so little of the attention it needs to survive, let alone 

thrive, the encouragement given by an art contest is much sought after and close to wanting. 

Next to the AAP, the oldest art contest is the Shell National Student Art Competition 

(NSAC) which has vowed to continue their creative tradition on its 42nd anniversary 

this year. 

The NSAC has long been bestowing certain immortality to artists at the onset of 

their creative vocation. And even in its latter years, an artist would join competitions like 

NSAC not for the prize but prestige. 

“Art competitions have come a long way from the time I used to join them. I remember 

participating in the Shell student art competition in 1962 and the cash award 

was 250 pesos. The current crop of visual artists is privileged to have supportive entities 

to encourage them to develop and produce outstanding works of art.” National Artist 

Benedicto Cabrera was once quoted in an art book. 

In 1984, Metropolitan Bank & Trust Company captured the call of the epoch and 

created the Metrobank Young Painters Annual (MYPA). Open to all Filipinos not more 

than 35 years old and who have not had a solo exhibition, the YPA is an open painting 

competition with “sign of the times” as an unwritten yet guiding theme to this day. Three 

years ago it was renamed Metrobank Art & Design Excellence (MADE) to accommodate 

other categories like Architecture, Interior Design, and Achievement in Sculpture. 

More than the cash prize it provides as incentive and a selling show during the awards 

night, the YPA has helped launched the careers of Roberto Feleo, Gabriel Barredo, Dennis 

Gonzales, Elmer Roslin, Maria Taniguchi, Leslie de Chavez, Norman Dreo, Alwin 

Reamillo and most of the members of the Salingpusa—Mark Justiniani, Elmer Borlongan, 

Ferdinand Montemayor, Anthony Palomo, Tony Leaño, and Karen Flores. 

Four years after, in 1988, the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company in 

partnership with the Directory Philippines Corporation would launch a unique and innovative 

scheme to promote Filipino values though the PLDT-DPC Telephone Directory 

Cover Visual Art Competition. Past winners like Gerri Dueñas, Alfredo Esquillo Jr, and 

Jaypee Samson saw their works being awarded and selected as cover in the PLDT-DPC 

directory. 

Esquillo, who was 28 years old then when he won almost every art award there is, 

tis a three-time winner of PLDT-DPC Telephone Directory Cover Visual Art Competition, 

the 1993 Metrobank Young Painters Annual Grand Prize winner, and two-time Philip 

Morris Asean Art winner. He still sees these art contests as relevant today, however only 

at a certain phase in one’s artistic career. 

“For the student, significant yung may approval ng new ground or experiment mo 

by the judges who are also critics in the art community. The only challenge is after the 

art contests, paano mo susundan?” said Esquillo, now 36 years old, emphasized in an 

interview. 

Other awards would come in as a corporation or government office saw these fit 

in their marketing strategies and overall company advocacies. There’s the Philip Morris 

Philippine Art Awards in 1997, ArtPetron National Student Competition in 2001, and 

the GSIS National Painting Competition in 2004. This year adding to the list there’s the 

LRT (Light Rail Transit) Art Competition, Pagalingang Pinoy by the city government 

of Makati and the Figurative Art Competition sponsored by the Big and Small Gallery 

and Philippine Drawing Society where at stake is a house and lot and cash prize for the 

lucky painting. 

As these art competitions were born, there were those who died a natural death. 

Some of them were Dow Jones Art Contest for People with Disability, the Nokia Digital 

Art Competition, Letras Y Figuras by Instituto Cervantes and the Remy Martin Public 

Art Competition, whose approved winning studies have already been executed as large 

works on the walls along Roxas Boulevard fronting Rizal Park. In fact, some of these 

murals are currently in critical condition and up for restoration, a sad reflection of the 

short-term planning some corporations that sponsor them have. 


The choice of judges in art competitions remains to be a factor. It is they who will 

decide, debate and dignify the winning art work. How do they say one work is better 

than the other? Each judge will definitely have his or her own preconceived biases and 

cultural notions. 

You cannot deny that a winner of a major art competition earns a certain pedigree 

of instant marketability. Even an exhibition slot would oftentimes depend on how many 

art awards an artist has won. 

“Some artists have luck in competitions, however others who won, I don’t know 

where they are now?” inquires Emmanuel Garibay, who also won the AAP Grand Prize 

for his work Santwaryo in 1993 and the NCCA Diwa ng Sining in 1994. 

“Depending on what you mean by relevance, as in all things, there is the good and 

bad side of it” Garibay explains further. “There is a conscious contextual reflection of 

what is going on in the country. Then there is the repeating of styles. Who ever won that 

year will definitely be imitated next year. In the end, it’s the artist’s persistence and passion 

that sustain him in the years to come.” 

With a few variations submitted by a small circle of painters who win art contests 

year after year, other participants bewail what they think are repetitive works. A situation 

like this puts oneself in a tight corner and Garibay’s comment has also been validated by 

other artists who have won these art prizes. 

Elmer Borlongan’s Tampuhan (roughly: “Lovers’ Quarrel) comes to mind. Although 

it placed second only in the MYPA in 1992, the winning work inspired more entries 

imitating his social realist style in the following years. This domino-effect even created 

a resurgence of social realism (as espoused by his Salingpusa group) that started with 

artists-activists during Martial Law in the 1970s. 

Another artist who has set a trend was Neil Manalo meticulously filling up the canvas 

with images in an altar-like triptych form as part of his graphic handle for the winning 

cover of the PLDT DPC directory. Again this kind of aesthetics would eventually dictate 

upon future submissions of “worshiping” students. Meanwhile the “longest” idol in Shell 

Student Art Competition is Ronald Ventura whose painstaking depiction of the human 

anatomy has become a standard emulated long after the applause faded and the trophy 

has been handed to him. Maybe Ventura brought back the excitement since before his 

winning, Shell had been criticized for just hanging on to its long years of experience, that 

boredom had seeped in and nothing new had come out of its winners. 

Fresh Paint All the Time 

With the earliest paintings dating back to when religious orders built their churches 

and painted their walls with religious images to magnify their faith, Philippine painting, 

as an adopted western art form, is as old as colonialism itself. 

In the last 30 years however there seems to be a deliberate effort in art contests to 

rediscover and appropriate pre-colonial images, motifs, and western belief systems as 

means of sourcing one’s identity in the midst of a rapidly changing milieu. 

The irony of art contests is that students try to unlearn whatever formal art practice 

they imbibed in their respective fine arts schools in every new entry they submit. Some 

of them did not only earn the accolade but are changing the overall landscape of painting 

and thus issuing an indirect refutation to what an American art critic called the “end of 

painting” ten years ago. Mark Andy Garcia’s Attack of the Righteous (MADE, 2007) is 

another case in point. His work depicts his sordid experience of working in the Middle 

East where in the most unlikely place, he even became a born again Christian. Done in 

quick, unequal with often tempered brushstrokes, the last thing you would think is that 

it is religious. With this work, he created an unusually hardcore piece deep in faith and 

morality. 

John Paul Antido’s El Viaje de Familia (ArtPetron, 2005) uses mapping as a graphic 

handle to literally convey the distance and the exodus of the Filipino family in the ongoing 

diaspora of Filipinos to the different parts of the world. 


In the long tradition of art contests, every participating student artist knows that 

there exists some kind of aesthetics or strategy when joining a particular visual art competition. 

A fetish for the new and original in approach, as far as the artistic process, is a 

must for a work to be noticed among the many others. Together with that is the creative 

use in materials and add to that the work must reflect Philippine contemporary life and 

issues as these are what are to be expected. As keenly observed, there seems to be a gray 

area as far as representational style is concerned. Lately there are no delineating lines 

whether your work is abstract or representational, biographical or political. 

Consider Vince Darwin Jumalon’s Sisikapin Kong Maging Isang Tunay na (I Will 

Strive to be a true, Philip Morris Asean Art Competition, 2005). The mosaic-like image 

of a woman filled with emotion was created using Japanese-anime stickers as a visual 

material. Or the recent Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards where Marina Cruz’s Embroidered 

Landscape of My Mothers’ Life: A Biography featured an infant’s dress worn 

by the artist’s mother, this being carefully stitched over and thus serving as a backdrop 

or a printed over canvas. 

There is little intervention in terms of painting in these two works which are essentially 

“painting” without, or with minimal use of paints. No one really knows what 

holds in contemporary Philippine art as seen in these past winners. The canvas has never 

been this wide open to possibilities indeed. 

Interviews 

Robert Besana, 13 July 2008 

Alfredo Esquillo Jr, 13 July 2008 

Emmanuel Garibay, 11 July 2008 

Kirby Roxas, 11 July 2008 

References 

Duldulao, Manuel D. Contemporary 

Philippine Art: From the Fifties to the 

Seventies. Vera-Reyes, 1971. 

Ramirez, Eileen L. “Crossbred and 

?migré: Visual Arts in a Flux” National 

Commission for Culture and the Arts, 

undated essay. 

Reyes, Cid. Conversations in Philippine 

Art. Cultural Center of the Philippines, 

1989. 

An earlier version of this essay came out 

in the catalogue for the Inaugural Exhibition 

of Britania Art Projects in 2008. 

The Paint that Lasts a Lifetime 

Each annual art competition rethinks conventions of the paint medium, thus, renewing 

faith and hope in its prospect of coming out with what is a fresh and captive representation 

of our present urban life. Do the contest rules of different art contests force them 

to question, if not rebel against conventions of painting? Recent winners vary greatly 

not just in terms of style or materials but also in terms of concerns, themes, and agenda. 

New spaces of promise in terms of iconography and iconology have emerged. 

Art competitions may still have their purpose as they are held in bigger exhibition 

halls with longer duration. There is a history of art that is well documented in the yearly 

catalogues, and winning artists are guided at least until their first formative shows. In a 

way, they consequently promote the culture of excellence and artistic promise for these 

young painters. The question that remains is: what have the previous winners done as a 

plow back to their community or to society to be worthy of these prizes? 

Esquillo perfectly sums it up, “You have to remember that it is only one work per 

art contest. You are good only until such time you will have a body of work to be proud 

of. Age will dictate if you are ripe for these competitions. There comes a time (when), 

you have to give chance to other younger ones to shine.” 

With the scarcity of blockbuster exhibits, painting competitions have provided the 

alternative excitement in showcasing their winners. Even in big galleries there is much 

to consider in conceptualizing and planning of shows for their calendar year. In fact the 

general sentiment is not the art spaces in the malls but the “continuous malling culture” 

of our museums and galleries. 

How Philippine art can become relevant to the times given this situation remains to 

be seen. In the meantime, there has always been the steady flow of grand prize winners 

in the yearly art competitions. It would be unwise to say that all these winning works 

merely reflect the general state of Philippine visual arts. With the dearth of Philippine 

art books written, could the history of Philippine art be told in patched-like quilts of all 

winning works of art contests through the years? 

One good thing that has come out of this is that there seems to be a following for 

winners of art competitions particularly since serious collectors are getting younger (in 

their 30s and 40s) compared to 40 years ago when art buying was confined to friends of 

the artists. 

Until a more professional system has been set up for the benefit of the young wouldbe-contemporary-Filipino 

artist, there will always be a long line of those submitting in 

the next art contest. In the end, art as an investment should enrich one’s life or fill up a 

blank canvas. 


enee alphonso 

Review 

The Brave New Works of 13A 

Subject/Object. Installation by 

MM Yu. 2009 13 Artists exhibition. 

Cultural Center of the Philippines. 

Photo credits: MM Yu. 

Transformation as a process implicates change; a metamorphosis that may or may not 

require any change in circumstance. This is the premise that surrounds the Thirteen Artists’ 

Awards exhibition, entitled Brave New Works and curated by former awardee Wire 

Tuazon (2003). 

The awards first arose as a curatorial project of the Center’s first curator, conceptual 

artist Roberto Chabet. Over the years the project then developed into an exhibition and 

awards, featuring progressive, young artists whose works embody the engagement of 

Philippine art in its present day context. 

The exhibit is transformative in three ways. First, on a more obvious level, is the 

context of physical space. Divisions within the gallery are quite literally nonexistent, as 

the artworks seem to seamlessly bleed into one another. Upon closer inspection, elements 

from certain works, like the tiny plastic mice from Buen Calubayan’s work, and MM 

Yu’s photographs of the exhibit’s installation process, integrate themselves into other 

works, making the installations interact with each other as well as their audience. Thus 

formed from this interaction is a alternative reality, in which physical space is not simply 

a setting but also an element contributing to the exhibit’s poignancy—whether for better 

or worse. Mr Tuason regrets in his curatorial statement that the exhibition did not have 

enough spatial freedom, as the institution did not welcome works that were to integrate 

other spaces outside the main gallery. 

Second, the exhibit invites us to rethink and ultimately transform our perception of 

what art is, and what it means in the Filipino context today. Each artist tackles themes such 

as family and home, religion, culture and national 

identity in their work. Their methods are meticulous 

but by no means timid; and each installation 

resonates with a distinct personal voice, skilled in 

technique and pulsating with the sentiments of a 

generation of artists. It is by these methods that the 

artists engage viewers to participate in this challenge 

of reinvention. Christina Dy’s “obsessive” 

drawing, as she terms it, creates an atmosphere 

upon entrance that draws out attention and allows 

us to re-examine and re-think where it is we stand, 

physically and on a more metaphysical level. Winner 

Jumalon’s witty and skilled reconstruction of 

his family’s Zambales home tackles themes of 

displacement, nostalgia, and disturbance. Kawayan 

De Guia’s rather interesting take on a Jukebox expresses the sentiments of a community 

and culture, refined into elements that come together into an awe-inspiring image. 

Perhaps most importantly, however, is how this exhibition is transformative in terms 

of the possibilities it presents for Philippine art. These works are works that incite bravery 

—bravery to actively participate in the discourse that contributes to the progression and 

development of art. Circumstances may not have changed completely, nor have spatial 

boundaries been completely traversed, but the work presented here may be the beginning 

of a true metamorphosis. By challenging current boundaries through the engagement of 

method, context, space, perception and interpretation, the exhibit invites us to take a risk, 

and step into a brave new world. 


About Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art 

Ctrl+P was founded in 2006 by Flaudette May V. Datuin and Judy Freya Sibayan as a response to 

the dearth of critical art publications in the Philippines. It is produced in Manila and published on the 

Web with zero funding. Contributors write gratis for Ctrl+P. Circulated as a PDF file via the Net, it 

is a downloadable and printable publication that takes advantage of the digital medium’s fluidity, immediacy, 

ease and accessibility. Ctrl+P provides a testing ground for a whole new culture and praxis 

of publishing that addresses very specifically the difficulties of publishing art writing and criticism in 

the Philippines. It took part in the documenta 12 magazines project, a journal of 97 journals from all 

over the world. (http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/) 

About Ctrl+P’s Contributors 

Kubilay Akman is a sociologist, academician, art critic and editor from Turkey. He studied sociology 

at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (Istanbul, Turkey) and completed his PhD dissertation in 2006 

at the same university. Akman has been in Southeast Asia several times to participate in academic 

events and projects, including ASEAN Inter-University Conference in Manila, Philippines (2008). 

His academic interests are sociology of arts, sociology of literature, cultural studies, social theory 

and philosophy. l Renée Alfonso is a graduate of Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, and currently a 

Master’s student in Exhibition Design at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC. 

She has previously worked at the Lopez Museum in Pasig, Philippines. l Jay Giovanni Bautista 

presently works as a Project Development Officer of Studio 5 Designs/Publishing. He studied for an 

MA in Art History at the University of the Philipines Diliman. He has been involved with the following 

publications: Malacañan Palace: The Official Illustrated History, Tanaw: The Bangko Sentral ng 

Pilipinas Painting Collection, and Brushstrokes From the Heart: The First Five Years of ArtPetron 

and is currently working on a coffee table book on Carlos “Botong” V. Francisco. l Gerry Coulter 

is a Full Professor of Sociology (Art, Film, and Theory) at Bishop’s University, Canada. Recent peer 

review publications include: ‘Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence of Gaming,’ SAGE 

Journal: Games and Culture (Volume 2, Number 4, December, 2007:358-365) and at: http://www. 

sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/4/358; ‘The Poetry of Reversibility and the Other in The English 

Patient,’ Widescreen Journal. (Volume 1, Number 1, April 2008): http://widescreenjournal.org/index. 

php/journal/article/view/15/14; ‘Baudrillard and Holderlin and the Poetic Resolution of the World’, 

Nebula, (Volume 5, Number 4, December 2008:145-164) and at: www.nobleworld.biz/Coulter.pdf. He 

also writes a quarterly column for Euro Art (On-line) Magazine (http://www.euroartmagazine.com). Dr. 

Coulter’s teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions most recently by Bishop’s University’s 

highest award for teaching the William and Nancy Turner Prize. He is the Founding and Managing 

Editor of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (On the Internet): (www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies). 

l Joselina Cruz is an independent curator based in Manila, Philippines. She was curator 

for the Singapore Biennale 2008 and one of the networking curators for the Jakarta Biennale 2009. She 

received her MA in Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art (RCA), London and has worked 

as Curator for the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila, and as Assistant Curator for the Singapore 

Art Museum. She was curator for You are not a Tourist, Curating Lab, Singapore, co-curator for the 

exhibition, All the Best: The Deutsche Bank Collection and Zaha Hadid, and the Tapies retrospective 

both at the Singapore Art Museum. She has curated numerous exhibitions, writes essays, reviews, 

criticism and art commentary. l Gina Fairley, a former arts manager in America and Australia, is a 

freelance arts writer widely published across Asia and Australia. She is Regional Contributing Editor 

for Asian Art News (Hong Kong) and splits her time between Sydney and Southeast Asia. She runs the 

Sydney window space SLOT with artist Tony Twigg. l Patrick D. Flores is Professor at Department 

of Art Studies, University of the Philippines and Curator of the Vargas Museum. He is also Adjunct 

Curator of the National Art Gallery of the Philippines and Singapore. His recent book Past Peripheral: 

Curation in Southeast Asia was published by the National University of Singapore Museum. 

l Irene S. Leung received a doctorate in art history from the University of Michigan and a master 

in International Affairs at The New School. Irene has worked in a gallery, auction house, non-profit 

institutions, and academia in the United States and Asia. A native of Hong Kong, she is working as an 

arts development consultant in Malaysia this year. l Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is a faculty member 

of the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines and curatorial consultant at the Lopez 

Memorial Museum. She has managed international projects and symposia including Locus: Critiquing 

Critical Art and serves as managing editor of Panananw, Philippine Journal of Visual Arts. Her essays 

have appeared in Transit: A Quaterly of Art Discussion, Fine Art Forum, Forum on Contemporary Art 

and Society, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, RealTime+Onscreen, ArtIT in Japan and 

Asia-Pacific, Visual Arts Magazine, Indonesia, Metropolis M, C-Arts, and the Sunday Inquirer. She 

is a 2009 US Endowment for the Arts International Visual Arts Journalism fellow. l Eliza Tan is a 

writer and curator from Singapore, currently based in London. Further to completing her art history 

degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she presently curates 7.9 Cubic Metres at the Stanley Picker 

Gallery, a 12 month evolving program of exhibitions and a platform for emerging British talent as well 

as international artists. A regular contributor to Ctrl+P, Eliza has worked on various projects with the 

National Arts Council, Singapore, The Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, Art Forum Berlin and 

European Art Projects. 


About Ctrl+P’s Editorial Board Members 

Flaudette May V. Datuin, associate professor at the Department of Art Studies, UP Diliman, is cofounding 

editor of Ctrl+P; co-founder and current chair of the House of Comfort Art Network or 

ARTHOC, a non-profit organization that conducts art workshops for the underprivileged and the afflicted. 

A 2008 Visiting Fellow (with grant) in the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National 

University (2008), Datuin is also recipient of the Asian Scholarship Foundation (ASF) and Asian Public 

Intellectual (API) fellowships, which enabled her to conduct research on contemporary women artists 

of China and Korea (2002-2003) and Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan (2004-2005). Author 

of Home Body Memory: Filipina Artists in the Visual Arts, 19th Century to the Present (University 

of the Philippines Press, (2002), she also curates and organizes international and local exhibits and 

publishes here and abroad. Datuin currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Art Theory 

and Aesthetics, Art History, Philippine Art and Society, and Art and Society, Asian contemporary art 

and aesthetics and gender issues in the arts. She obtained her MA and PhD in Philippines Studies from 

the University of the Philippines. 

Varsha Nair lives in Bangkok, Thailand. Her selected shows include Still Moving Image, Devi Art 

Foundation, New Delhi, 2008; A Proper Place, Ryllega Gallery, Hanoi, 2007; Art as Environment: 

Cultural Actions on Tropic of Cancer 007, Taiwan; Exquisite Crisis & Encounters, NYU, New York, 

2007; Subjected Culture-Interruptions and resistances on femaleness, venues in Argentina 2007-2008; 

Sub-Contingent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Fondazion Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 

Turin, Italy, 2006; In-between places, meeting point, Si-am Art Space, Bangkok, 2005; Video as Urban 

Condition, Austrian Culture Forum, London, UK, 2004, With(in), Art In General, New York, 2002; 

Home/Dom, Collegium Artisticum, Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, 2002; Free Parking, Art Center, 

Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 2002. She performed at On the Move, Hong Kong, 2008; Khoj 

Live Performance Festival, Delhi, 2008; Saturday Live, Tate Modern London, 2006; National Review 

of Live Art, 2006 and 2004; National Review of Live Art Midland, Perth, Australia, 2005.Since 1997, 

Nair has also curated and organized Womanifesto (www.womanifesto.com) and other art related activities, 

and has been invited as speaker at various international symposia. She was the Bangkok curator 

of 600 Images/60 artists/6 curators/6 cities: Bangkok/Berlin/London/Los Angeles/Manila/Saigon, an 

exhibition that was simultaneously exhibited in all 6 cities in 2005. Born in Kampala, Uganda, Nair 

has a BFA from Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, Baroda, India. 

Judy Freya Sibayan, co-founding editor of Ctrl+P, has an MFA from Otis Art Institute of Parsons 

School of Design. She is former director of the erstwhile Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines. 

She performed and curated Scapular Gallery Nomad, (www.asa.de/magazine/iss4/17sibayan. 

htm) a gallery she wore daily for five years (1997-2002), and is currently co-curator and the Museum 

of Mental Objects (MoMO), a performance art proposing that the artist’s body be the museum itself 

(http://www.trauma-interrupted.org/judy/writing1.pdf). Although Sibayan’s major body of work is an 

institutional critique of art, she has also exhibited and performed in museums, galleries and performance 

venues such as Latitude 53, Edmonton, Canada; PEER Gallery Space, London; Privatladen in 

Berlin; The Tramway, Glasgow; the Vienna Secession; the Hayward Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art 

Center, The Farm in San Francisco; Sternersenmuseet; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; ArtSpace 

Sydney; The Kiasma Contemporary Art Center, The Mori Art Museum, The Museum of Far Eastern 

Antiquities, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Fukuoka Art Museum; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 

Hong Kong Art Centre; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; and at the capcMusée d’art 

contemporain de Bordeaux. She has participated in two international art biennales, the 1986 3rd Asian 

Art Biennale Bangladesh and the 2002 Gwangju Biennale. Also an independent curator, she curated 

The Community Archives: Documenting Artists Collectively, Openly held at Latitude 53 (Edmonton, 

Alberta Canada). She also conceived and was lead-curator of xsXL Expanding Art held at Sculpture 

Square, Singapore in 2002 and 600 Images/60 Artists/6 Curators/6 Cities: Bangkok/Berlin/London/Los 

Angeles/Manila/Saigon in 2005. The latter two projects investigated the possibilities of developing large 

scale international exhibitions mounted with very modest resources. She currently teaches as an Assistant 

Professor of the Department of Communication, De La Salle University (www.dlsu.edu.ph).

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